Private Islands

[Lexie Linden]

Share advice and  best practices related to private islands in this thread.

[Pauline Darkfury]

Tips for renting some or all of a private island/region from an estate:

1. Make sure you know who the actual estate owner is if renting.  Most estates will try to assist you in finding new land, but will not compensate you for lost L$ if you are subletting and your landlord does not pay the estate.
2. Read the estate covenant carefully before paying anything.  You are bound by the terms in it and may not get any refund if you later discover that the covenant has something in it which is a problem for you.
3. If you have bought a parcel on a private estate, you only have limited rights to that land, and the estate can reclaim the land from you.  LL will generally not intervene if you feel the land was reclaimed unfairly on a private estate.
4. Buying estate land is only the first stage.  There will always be some sort of tier payment required, make sure you understand the arrangements and fees.
5. Private estate land has the highest cost from LL in monthly tier charges and LL must be paid on time by them, so don't expect a great deal of sympathy from your estate if you can't pay them on time (unless you have been a very good tenant for a long time).  It's kinda harsh, but estate owners and managers don't want excuses or complicated arrangements over payments, they just want the agreed amount on time.
6. Shop around, there are many estates out there, many different covenants, many different styles of estate region.  The size of the estate doesn't really matter all that much, just make sure you find the land that is right for you.
7. If the worst happens and you login one day to find that the estate has folded and your region is offline, don't panic too much.  Any tier already paid to your estate is probably gone, unfortunately.  Your objects are not gone, however.  If you put a ticket in to LL, they will normally put the region back online for 24 hours as a goodwill gesture, to allow you to retrieve your objects.
8. Get to know who the estate staff are and how to best contact them for any land/region support you need.
9. If you own the entire region (or most of it), the estate owner may be happy to give you EM (Estate Manager) rights for the region.  This gives you a great deal of control over the region, such as the ability to restart it on demand, change the terrain textures, adjust terraforming limits, the position of the sun, control the estate level access lists, etc.

[Ariel Liveoak]

Sorry if this is in the wrong place, but can't figure out where the right place might be.

A question that I have never been able to get or find an answer for...  What happens to a private island when it is deactivated? Is there a "backup" somewhere so that it could come back online sometime? Or is it wiped from all databases?

I owned an island for four years, until I was laid off from my RL job. A friend took over ownership and financial responsibility, and kept the island open for another year, before she too had to let it go. I didn't get the news until the island had already closed, and it was too late for me to go and pick up rather a lot of no-copy items that I had left there.

I'm just wondering if things will still be there when one or the other of us is in a position to be able to re-activate the island, or if it's all gone and we would have to start over completely from scratch. I've never seen an answer to this question, and no one I've talked to has any idea.

[Peewee Musytari]

You don`t say how long since the sim was taken offline.

If you contact support and ask for the sim to be brought back online, LL will roll it back and allow you 24 hours to collect your stuff. But I have only ever heard of that being done soon after the sim was zapped, like when tenants login to find the sim owner has lost the sim and all their things are gone with it, so I don`t know if there is a time limit on them being able to do that.

Either way you will need to ask support, good luck

[Ariel Liveoak]

Thanks for the reply!  It went offline around the end of May.

I guess my question does actually have two parts to it... yes, one is whether or not I could get my stuff. The other is the longer-term question of whether we can get the sim back online sometime in the future by starting to pay the tier again.

[Peewee Musytari]

I would start by contacting support about getting your stuff back & if they say a month is too long and its all gone, then that will answer the other question at the same time.

If the owners account went deliquent, then they may be locked out of the sim until the tier is paid, but I think in cases like that, that the sim doesn`t go off of the grid, its usually just showing as red and offline on the map. So it sounds in your case like that sim is actually deleted, but as you know, deleted doesn`t always mean gone in SL.