Sim priceing still the same since the AWS move?

[Oliver Larimore]

Hey all,

I'm just curiouse to why we havnt seem much of a price change on full sims? since the amzon web move, its like they are sticking with If people are paying then lets stick with it, surely it should bring the costs down massively as we arnt paying there rental costs for the hardware now ,just for the instence the server is useing.

Then you have the in-wolrd mine feild of land companys makeing loads of us paying full prices for granfarthrd rated areas.

A responce from a Employee would be good to see if.

cheers

Ollie

Edited August 23, 2021 by Oliver Larimore

[Alwin Alcott]

12 minutes ago, Oliver Larimore said:

surely it should bring the costs down massively as we arnt paying there rental costs for the hardware now ,just for the instence the server is useing.

perhaps a wake up, but the, now retired rl, Linden employee involved with this job told there is no costsaving with the transfer.
So.. don't think we'll get rich now.

[asteriddle]

iirc (take this with a grain of salt, i saw this in another thread), the AWS actually costs LL more to host on. i believe they've repeatedly said region/homestead costs wont be going down

[Oliver Larimore]

32 minutes ago, Alwin Alcott said:

perhaps a wake up, but the, now retired rl, Linden employee involved with this job told there is no costsaving with the transfer.
So.. don't think we'll get rich now.

Its a shame, im stuck in this horrable loop where people dont want help me move to a full sim ive tryed with second sim but no one wanted to rent on that, ill stick with what i have i guess.

[LittleMe Jewell]

56 minutes ago, Oliver Larimore said:

Hey all,

I'm just curiouse to why we havnt seem much of a price change on full sims? since the amzon web move, its like they are sticking with If people are paying that lets stick with it, surely it should bring the costs down massively as we arnt paying there rental costs for the hardware now ,just for the instence the server is useing.

Then you have the in-wolrd mine feild of land companys makeing loads of us paying full prices for granfarthrd rated areas.

A responce from a Employee would be good to see if.

cheers

Ollie

 

The info is in the Lab Gab from this past Feb:

 

Inara transcribed most of it.  Scroll down to "Will the migration mean lower prices for users":

https://modemworld.me/2021/02/26/lab-gab-feb-26-summary-aws-update-and-a-farewell-to-oz/

Edited August 23, 2021 by LittleMe Jewell

[Oliver Larimore]

Ah intrsting thanks, all we can do is hope.

[ChinRey]

LL's hosting cost is only a tiny fraction of what they charge in tier anyway so a change there wouldn't have made much difference.

[Jules Catlyn]

1 hour ago, Oliver Larimore said:

Its a shame, im stuck in this horrable loop where people dont want help me move to a full sim ive tryed with second sim but no one wanted to rent on that, ill stick with what i have i guess

What help do you expect from others? Try developing a business model on your own that will pay for them.

[Oliver Larimore]

1 hour ago, Jules Catlyn said:

What help do you expect from others? Try developing a business model on your own that will pay for them.

well id like to go halfs with someone but soon as money is involved its noo

Edited August 23, 2021 by Oliver Larimore
edit

[Rob Huntsman]

3 hours ago, asteriddle said:

iirc (take this with a grain of salt, i saw this in another thread), the AWS actually costs LL more to host on. i believe they've repeatedly said region/homestead costs wont be going down

I don't believe this until I see the bill on market shares for it. It's cheaper or they would've never bothered moving too the cloud if there was no money to be made.

[Rowan Amore]

46 minutes ago, Oliver Larimore said:

well id like to go halfs with someone but soon as money is involved its noo

It's the reason a lot of people don't own a region.  I'd love a BMW in RL but I have to settle for a Hyundai instead because.....money.  Prices almost NEVER go down on items people really want once it's been established that people will pay more.

[Quistess Alpha]

2 minutes ago, Rob Huntsman said:

I don't believe this until I see the bill on market shares for it. It's cheaper or they would've never bothered moving too the cloud if there was no money to be made.

This has been gone over several times on other threads, but here's the basic overview. On a Per-Sim-basis (or region technically) the cost is roughly the same or perhaps a few % higher. However, Before they moved to the cloud, they had a fixed capacity. The warehouse could only hold X number of servers, so you can only have Y regions. if someone wanted to buy the Y+1th region, they would have been SOL. With the cloud move, LL can buy exactly the amount of server-space that they need. If there's a sudden uptick in demand, they can instantly (or at least very quickly) get the resources from amazon to fill it. if there's a sudden dip, they can more easily take regions offline downscale the expense.

[Quistess Alpha]

3 hours ago, Oliver Larimore said:

Its a shame, im stuck in this horrable loop where people dont want help me move to a full sim ive tryed with second sim but no one wanted to rent on that, ill stick with what i have i guess.

Hmm, it's comparing apples and oranges, but Kitely (an OpenSim grid manager) has fairly low prices for their "worlds" but they support fewer avatars per region.

[LittleMe Jewell]

47 minutes ago, Rob Huntsman said:

I don't believe this until I see the bill on market shares for it. It's cheaper or they would've never bothered moving too the cloud if there was no money to be made.

The primary reason people move their servers to the cloud is for flexibility and easier/faster expansion -- not because it is actually cheaper to run each server.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

LL was using 10 to 12 year old Server equipment in their datacenter in arizona,  LL moved to eliminate that issue,  the side effect is aws is costing them more than their physical foot print,  it's how it works until you can recoup costs and other factors,  so knowing what we know, as Oz was pretty transparent in the video,  I guess maybe at some point in the future they maybe can make adjustments, but they also want to expand with more aws instances in other parts of the world,  so Their costs are going to be going up, unless they decide to only host it where it is now in the one aws site in Oregon.

[Velk Kerang]

5 hours ago, ChinRey said:

LL's hosting cost is only a tiny fraction of what they charge in tier anyway so a change there wouldn't have made much difference.

This right here is exactly right. LL charges what they charge because they can get away with it. In reality a lot of builders would rather pay a $20 dollar a month hosting fee for an entire region on another grid and then port their creations to main grid rather then paying the costs here. Some just host them themselves. Unless your dealing in real estate then I've personally never found it cost effective to invest in a full on sim from a business perspective and even that is unstable ground on investment returns. I should know I managed a few of them back in the day and would go over the books and that was back when SL was booming in population. lol😎

[Paul Hexem]

4 hours ago, Rob Huntsman said:

I don't believe this until I see the bill on market shares for it. It's cheaper or they would've never bothered moving too the cloud if there was no money to be made.

Right. No business makes a decision because it'll cost them more and benefit them in no way at all. That said...

4 hours ago, Quistess Alpha said:

This has been gone over several times on other threads, but here's the basic overview. On a Per-Sim-basis (or region technically) the cost is roughly the same or perhaps a few % higher. However, Before they moved to the cloud, they had a fixed capacity. The warehouse could only hold X number of servers, so you can only have Y regions. if someone wanted to buy the Y+1th region, they would have been SOL. With the cloud move, LL can buy exactly the amount of server-space that they need. If there's a sudden uptick in demand, they can instantly (or at least very quickly) get the resources from amazon to fill it. if there's a sudden dip, they can more easily take regions offline downscale the expense.

The fact that they can now easily scale up and down is what saves them the money, overall.

[Nova Convair]

You need the building, cooling, energy, connection, the hardware that needs to be replaced regularly, people that keep everything running, redundancy, backup, 24/7 emergency and a few things I forgot. By moving that to a cloud you can hand over all that responsibilities and resources. Of course amazon needs to take the same efforts to keep things running and they expect to make money with it - and someone needs to pay the spaceflights. 😁

I have no clue why people think all the time it's cheaper.

What you win here is that you can concentrate your resources on your business and no longer on the technology and you can easily scale up or down - so it can pay out in the long term.

The downside is no privacy and reliability guaranteed (from my point of view) but since LL is american that is no factor here.

[ChinRey]

27 minutes ago, Nova Convair said:

I have no clue why people think all the time it's cheaper.

Because Amazon employees are tough people who don't need such expensive and unnecessary luxuries as bathroom breaks and wages so high they can afford food and housing.

[Alwin Alcott]

1 hour ago, Nova Convair said:

I have no clue why people think all the time it's cheaper.

 

26 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

Because ...

because.......................  LL díd actually talk about possible cheaper  inworld costs when the project was announced .... i can't find the posts, but it's something that;s a sticky somewhere in my memory

[Sid Nagy]

The most important goals (for every sane company) are making profit and continuity of the business.
Et voila.
Product prices are never what they actually cost, but what the consumer is willing to pay for it. That's why the regions cost what they cost. It has nothing to do with the actual running costs.
And for continuity reasons LL shifted the hardware demands to keep the grid afloat to Amazon.

Edited August 24, 2021 by Sid Nagy

[Innula Zenovka]

16 hours ago, Oliver Larimore said:

Hey all,

I'm just curiouse to why we havnt seem much of a price change on full sims? since the amzon web move, its like they are sticking with If people are paying then lets stick with it, surely it should bring the costs down massively as we arnt paying there rental costs for the hardware now ,just for the instence the server is useing.

Then you have the in-wolrd mine feild of land companys makeing loads of us paying full prices for granfarthrd rated areas.

A responce from a Employee would be good to see if.

cheers

Ollie

This isn't how pricing works, though, in either first or second life.

Businesses, whether it's LL, Amazon or your favourite  local bar or restaurant, charge what their customers prepared to pay.    That's how the capitalist economy and free market work.     

ETA:  As I understand it, the shift to AWS changed LL's cost structure -- previously they had the whopping great big fixed cost of leasing and maintaining the servers and associated hardware, combined with low marginal costs for each new region they brought and kept online.   Now with AWS, they've removed the large up-front investment in hardware, but regions cost a lot more to maintain.     Patch explained this on a recent Meet The Somebodies show (Moles, I think, but it could have been Lindens)  in the course of explaining why they have to think twice about the number of water regions they devote to providing routes between continents -- they cost in a way they didn't previously.

Edited August 24, 2021 by Innula Zenovka

[Qie Niangao]

I don't expect any significant change to pricing of existing Land products, but I'm not sure that was ever really in the cards. Rather, I expect some new products to emerge that take better advantage of AWS's capacity-on-demand. It's kinda wacked that a full region for an individual's occasional use is the same price as the same full region constantly filled with event shoppers. Before AWS those two regions cost the same for LL to operate, but now that unserved "region on demand" market is a business opportunity: a whole lotta folks won't spring for the current full region product but, rather than always-on access to a little parcel or a crippled homestead, would spend more to have their own full region only on their and friends' schedules.

That obviously requires significant server-side changes, though, so I hope they've got enough developers working on it.

(FWIW the move to AWS must change LL's accounting dramatically. Rather than depreciating a massive pile of capital, it's shifted to massively increased operating expense. To the bottom line, though, the change is probably minimal, steady state, but with AWS they have much more flexibility to scale and shift product offerings.)

Edited August 24, 2021 by Qie Niangao

[Eirynne Sieyes]

12 hours ago, Quistess Alpha said:

Hmm, it's comparing apples and oranges, but Kitely (an OpenSim grid manager) has fairly low prices for their "worlds" but they support fewer avatars per region.

When a Kitely region has no residents present, the region goes offline. It returns once an avatar visits. They use this method to save money. It's not a bad idea; I don't notice much delay going into a sleeping region.

While 'instant on' works for Kitely with its much smaller user base and less richly scripted/decorated environment, I wonder if same could be applied to low-use SL regions like water ways, light homesteads, etc., and if it would cut costs.

Edited August 24, 2021 by Eirynne Sieyes

[Jaylinbridges]

I have never seen an SL region go from offline to on in an instant.  More like 20 seconds for a rich region to settle down after a restart.  Breedables need always on also, as do other processes that might be running that require real-time communications.  What happens when you TP into a sleeping region?  You get a message, "yawn,  you woke me up, please wait until I get my coffee before landing?"

Empty regions still cost something in AWS.  I don't think anyone has detailed the actual pricing scheme per region for AWS SL regions.  But it appears to be more than with their old Phoenix servers, which as Oz said, only needed a small crew to maintain.  They could also use their oldest slowest servers for light regions such as open water and scenery in Linden owned land.  I doubt AWS has a collection of 10 year old servers they can use for light loads. 

And how would region crossings work for fliers and boaters if the region was offline that you were entering at 50m/sec?  Would give new meaning to border crossing lag.