It’s a simple enough question - often when I see a company or group get involved in OpenSim, the first thing that springs to their mind is “Well, we must launch our own grid!”, with each grid having it’s own isolated set of users, inventory, assets and regions the question must be asked: “Why?”.

But in most cases, this often isn’t the best of ideas, and short of internal uses it’s often counterproductive duplicating effort others have undertaken already. Running a grid properly takes a lot of work - especially if you are doing frequent updates, if your intent is on making it a popular destination for random visitors, then you have extra work publicizing and convincing people to create an account and login.

All in all, it’s a lot of work for relatively little benefit.

Alternatives to starting your own grid

Attach your region[s] to an existing grid - I personally like recommending OSGrid.org - one of the downsides to this approach is that you are relying on the grid provider for your infrastructure - if they either neglect to update frequently you may run into problems, likewise if they have downtime or stability problems, you are tethered to them good and bad.

So, why do it then?

The short answer is to do it for your users, if you require users to register an account on your grid to come view your trinket, you have effectively annihilated any chance of instant gratification so to speak. The difference between opening a map on a popular grid, and logging out then relogging onto your grid is huge. It requires a good deal of effort to to so.

The longer answer lies in pooling resources - in this case users, users may log in to view your trinket, but after they are done with it, go visit someone elses trinket nearby, the key here is that people who come for other peoples shinies may end up visiting yours too - there’s no zero-sum game here, and offering a multitude of attractions is more powerful a drawcard than yours alone.

When you should make your own grid?

There’s plenty of reasons to run your own grid however - the biggest one is privacy and wanting to run something entirely behind a single corporate firewall. Protecting intellectual property and trade secrets requires making reasonable protections when possible, and public grids are not well suited for this.

Another reason is when you want to run something solely independently - such as say a specific concert or event, where you know that your demands require customisations on the grid software itself. In these cases unless you are able to make an arrangement with the grid operator you may run into problems and hosting oneself is a good idea.

So which grids allow outside regions to connect?

OSGrid.org is the best for this since the entire grid is hosted externally - making sure this works smoothly is a goal of the osgrid admins. Connecting a region is free and there are no real terms of service at the moment to speak of, other than “don’t break the law.”

DeepGrid has allowed regions to connect since the beggining - although the grid server software is updated less frequently than the OSGrid ones. A common terms of service do apply for this and region spaces need to be reserved via the website first before connecting (rather than first-come-first-served, price is still free).

CentralGrid offer region connections too however connecting a region invokes a large fee that isnt charged anywhere else, for as far as I can see no advantage. I’m not impressed, but you may be.