New World Prices, and Dedicated Memory
Kitely has always provided great performance for low prices, and today we’re happy to announce that we’ve reduced the price of large worlds by 60%! Standard Worlds have been reduced in price from $49.95 to $19.95 per month, and Advanced Worlds have been reduced in price from $99.95 to $39.95 per month.
In addition, all Kitely worlds now get a large amount of dedicated memory: between 1024 MB and 4096 MB, depending on the world type. Previously worlds were not guaranteed any particular amount of memory. Having a lot of dedicated memory is important to ensure that worlds with many prims, scripts or avatars run fast and lag-free.
Here’s the new price list, and how much dedicated memory each type of world gets:
| Starter World | Standard World | Advanced World | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maximum world size | 1 Region | 4 Regions | 16 Regions |
| Maximum prims | 15,000 | 60,000 | 120,000 |
| Avatar capacity | 10 | 40 | 80 |
| Dedicated memory (RAM) | 1024 MB | 2048 MB | 4096 MB |
| World speed | Fast | Faster | Fastest |
| Price | $14.95 / month | $19.95 / month | $39.95 / month |
How Does This Affect You?
If you have an existing Starter World then you don’t need to do anything, since the price of the world hasn’t changed, and you’ll get the new dedicated memory automatically. However, you might want to consider upgrading to a Standard World, since for only $5/month more than what you’re paying now you’ll get significantly more server resources, be able to build a world that is 4 times as large, and allow 4 times as many avatars into your world.
If you have an old-price Standard World ($49.95/month) or Advanced World ($99.95/month) then we encourage you to switch to the new world types now, and thus save a lot of money. This is necessary because these discounts aren’t applied automatically to existing worlds.
High Performance Worlds
The introduction of dedicated memory is just the latest step in our mission to provide the fastest, highest-quality OpenSim hosting service. Kitely worlds are fast for a number of reasons:
First, we run OpenSim on powerful servers with Intel Xeon E5-2670 CPUs and SSD hard drives. Each world gets a generous amount of dedicated memory: between 1024 MB and 4096 MB, depending on the world type. Each world also gets fast and unlimited bandwidth.
We place no more than 4 worlds on each server. This ensures that each world gets plenty of RAM and CPU power. Even better: as a world gets more visitors we automatically scale up the amount of CPU, network, and I/O resources it gets in order to maintain good performance, at no additional price! This means that a world with many visitors can get an entire server all to itself. Only Kitely, with our on-demand, cloud-based architecture, can offer such a service. Advanced Worlds are especially privileged: they get more server resources than other world types at all times (even when they have only a single avatar in them).
Another important way that we offer high performance is our proprietary and highly optimized version of OpenSim. Kitely users benefit from more than 400 OpenSim optimization and stability patches that we’ve created that don’t exist in regular OpenSim (totaling more than 30,000 lines of code). In addition, we use our own cloud-based Asset and Inventory services, which are much faster than the services that come with regular OpenSim. These enhancements ensure that Kitely worlds start up much faster than they can on regular OpenSim; that they take significantly less time to rezz; and that they’re more stable while many people are using them. Our enhancements also enable Kitely users to have large inventories that perform well both while in Kitely, and during their Hypergrid visits to other grids.
No More Premium Accounts
As we announced last month, as of today we no longer offer Premium Accounts: all new users get a Regular Account. However, users who already have a Premium Account or Gold Plan can keep it for as long as they continue paying for it.
Kitely Provides the Best Value for Your Money
Are you interested in getting your own virtual world? Get a Kitely world now. There are no setup fees, and no delays. When you buy a Kitely world it’s ready to use immediately. If you’re a new user then you can even create a Trial World for free and use it for 6 hours, all without giving us your billing information.
