i am just wondering

[Jessicatje Artful]

hiya ,

im just wondering :

why do we need to pay 1000 us dollar setup fee for a sim server ?

why do we pay almost the price for a real life house to have our own sim ?

i mean almost 300 us dollar tier a month !

why ? ,

thats the reason i dont own land anymore ..... its just not affordable ... sadly , if they would change these prices like some other grids did , i might reconsider , but right now its not doable , financial crisis !.

[Deruub Pastorelli]

And if all simowners would stop paying this idiot high amount. and use the money for real houses. all the homeles poeple could be housed. and the places they pay for would have way more traffic then all those boring tropical islands where no one ever comes. idea?

[Jessicatje Artful]

you got a point in there ............. but they dont stop

[Amethyst Jetaime]

You don't have to pay this amount.  Buy a sim on the secondary market for a LOT less.  There is only a 150 transfer fee that is negotiable as to if the buyer or seller pays it.  You can find sims for 200US and up depending on the date the next tier is due. Always find this out and take it into consideration when making a decision on what is a reasonable price. 

This forum has notices from people wanting to sell their sims.  There are also groups you can join in world where people advertise sims for sale.

[Jessicatje Artful]

200 us dollar is still to much like i said its sad they raised these prices

[DaniDarko]

You don't need to rent a whole sim to live in SL. You can pay under $75 a year & get a free cottage-size home with your premium account. Then if you want to build big stuff, you can use a free sandbox.

If you want to give that money to a homeless shelter instead of using it to play in SL, you can do that. But most people like to spend some money on recreation & leisure activities for themselves. Maybe instead of going out to movies & drinking Starbucks coffee, they spend $30-$60. month on Second Life. That's not too much money for most people who own a personal computer.

Many of us struggle to make ends meet financially, some more than others. But that doesn't mean people who can afford to spend money on having a little fun should feel guilty about doing do. Some sims in SL also provide groups of people opportunities to interact with each other & even learn stuff, so owning a sim or region may not be a solely selfish decision.

[Jessicatje Artful]

that sim is an example ....

land prices are just way to high , even if you buy mainland its not cheap.

60 us dollar is not to much ?

well if your RL home is more important ... than yes thats to much !

[Jessicatje Artful]

plus who said thats selfish ? dont turn words here

i post a question with why are the prices that high ! nor calling sim owners selfish or whatever ...........

as a sl resident i have the right to know from LL why these prices are this high ... think lots people wants to know this as well , due lots people are in a financial crisis , some people even loose their acount due they cant pay premium membership or land fees on time, so in my opinian answers are welcome . or maybe even some price drops or amazing offers for sl residents.

[Duckie Dickins]

Well you might not realize how much it costs to have servers in a colocation facility. I've worked for a large dot.com in the past and besides just the rental of the rack space, our bandwidth cost was over a million dollars a month. Yes...businesses pay for the bandwidth they use on the internet, not to mention the power required to power those servers. Servers under high cpu load are only good for a few years at most and need constant replacing. This also costs money. Considering the high turnover rate of full sims, the $1000 set up price is a little steep but you also have to factor in that there are paid employees monitoring the servers and the network 24 hours a day, 7 days a week including holidays. When I was working for the dot.com travel site, the company flew us out to Maui for a pre-christmas vacation and I still had to take my laptop with me to monitor the servers in the event that one of the servers starts having issues and the monintoring software texts my phone to prompt me to fix something.

In the end, it costs how much it costs for a very good reason.

[Amethyst Jetaime]

^^ this

As someone also pointed out it depends on what your priorities are.  I'm sure there are things you spend money on in RL for entertainment or enjoyment and if you really wanted to you could reorganize your priorities to afford a modest piece of land here.  If not, you don't have to have land to enjoy Second Life.  In fact land is the ONLY thing that you can't get for free.

Although I'd like lower tiers too, in the end Linden Lab is a for profit business not a charity.

[Hermione Lefevre]

I CHOOSE to pay for my land..I dont have to, i can get a small parcel and pay less but you get what you pay for.

I dont go out drinking or partying and that money saved i can spend on second life and i dont feel guilty about it. Some people can afford stuff which others can`t..thats life .

I dont think you have a RIGHT to know..smile..everyone is free to play or leave

[Curious Hazelnut]

I hope you are still reading this, since it appears nobody has acutally answered your question. Why does Linden Lab charge a $1000 set-up fee for a new private island and $300 tier per month (or $200 per month for mainland)?

They charge the $1000 to cover their capital costs of purchasing, configuring, and racking (mounting in the data center) a server (actually about 1/4 to 1/8th of a server). If you look at commercial grade fully-managed server rental, you will find that the price Linden Lab charges is pretty reasonable. Linden Lab is not Amazon. They don't run their own data centers, they rent space in data centers (2 last time I checked). Are they making money on the $1000 set-up fee? Almost certainly they are, but it's probably not huge.

As to the $300 a month private island teir, this is also in-line with a fully managed top rated server. Linden Lab needs to cover the hosting costs, network bandwidth usage (and we use a LOT), operating system maintenance, Second Life server (and viewer) development costs, call center support, etc. This also covers the asset servers. As with above, they are not Amazon, they can't get the economies of scale that Amazon does. And in any case Amazon does not provide fully managed servers. Amazon provides VMs that you have to manage yourself. So, even if Linden Lab could afford to match Amazon's hosting costs, Second Life would still cost more because of the software development and added overhead of system administration.

If you think that Linden Lab isn't using a top-rated hosting facility, you might want to try some of the opensimulator systems running on Amazon. Region crossings in Second Life are incredibly smooth compared to the last time I tried one of the alternatives. And those alternatives don't have the software development overhead that Linden Lab did.

While I am not willing to pay the tier for a full region, I don't think their pricing is completely unrealistic based on my estimates of their costs. I'm sure more than $100 a month of the $300 private island cost is profit, but there is a reason why mainland is $200 a month for a full region (to encourage use of mainland). I doubt the private island profit is much over $100.

[Jessicatje Artful]

thanks , this was indeed kinda my question , i was wondering how come prices are that high,

tyvm Curious hazelnut xx.

[Paul Hexem]

---

Curious Hazelnut wrote:

I hope you are still reading this, since it appears nobody has acutally answered your question. Why does Linden Lab charge a $1000 set-up fee for a new private island and $300 tier per month (or $200 per month for mainland)?

They charge the $1000 to cover their capital costs of purchasing, configuring, and racking (mounting in the data center) a server (actually about 1/4 to 1/8th of a server). If you look at commercial grade fully-managed server rental, you will find that the price Linden Lab charges is pretty reasonable. Linden Lab is not Amazon. They don't run their own data centers, they rent space in data centers (2 last time I checked). Are they making money on the $1000 set-up fee? Almost certainly they are, but it's probably not huge.

As to the $300 a month private island teir, this is also in-line with a fully managed top rated server. Linden Lab needs to cover the hosting costs, network bandwidth usage (and we use a LOT), operating system maintenance, Second Life server (and viewer) development costs, call center support, etc. This also covers the asset servers. As with above, they are not Amazon, they can't get the economies of scale that Amazon does. And in any case Amazon does not provide fully managed servers. Amazon provides VMs that you have to manage yourself. So, even if Linden Lab could afford to match Amazon's hosting costs, Second Life would still cost more because of the software development and added overhead of system administration.

If you think that Linden Lab isn't using a top-rated hosting facility, you might want to try some of the opensimulator systems running on Amazon. Region crossings in Second Life are incredibly smooth compared to the last time I tried one of the alternatives. And those alternatives don't have the software development overhead that Linden Lab did.

While I am not willing to pay the tier for a full region, I don't think their pricing is completely unrealistic based on my estimates of their costs. I'm sure more than $100 a month of the $300 private island cost is profit, but there is a reason why mainland is $200 a month for a full region (to encourage use of mainland). I doubt the private island profit is much over $100.

---

Even considering their costs, sims are overpriced for the quality and service we get.

You did forget one thing about your price estimations. Server hardware is shared. In the case of homesteads, shared what, four times? They're making a huge profit on land, not a tiny one.

[jwenting]

and they're using that to cover everything else. Running the website, these forums idiots constantly use to try and drive them out of business, all the network traffic and CPU cycles for users who never pay a cent by buying L$ or land, development of new capabilities and fixing bugs in the existing system, etc. etc. etc..

If you think it's too expensive, and SL is so bad it's not worth the money, your choice to saddle other people with the cost of your entertainment, or worse your running a business in SL and trying to make money of your own.

[Jessicatje Artful]

jwentig you should just calm down , no one tries to end sl here ! its a forum to share opinions , if you cant handdle this ... get off the forum ps go wash your mouth , the most idiots are the people who call others idiots so grab a mirror and say it again.