AjaxLife Seeking Donations To Survive

Want to keep accessing Second Life chat from the iPhone, and other web browsers? Teen SLer Katharine Berry needs funds to cover the server costs required to run her revolutionary web-to-SL application, which she estimates at $130 a month.  Normally, the best way to subsidize an SL-centric project would be through Linden Dollar donations, but because Katharine's still in Teen Second Life, that's not feasible.  More details at her blog.  I'm not an IT network expert, but $130 a month seems like a steep price to pay.  When I interviewed the creator of the insanely popular web game Desktop Tower Defense last year, he told me his server costs were also just $130/month-- even when his site was attracting 4 million players and 20 million page views.  Perhaps someone can suggest cheaper server alternatives for Ms. Berry?

Comments

[Efemera Bisiani]

No idea if any relevance, but isn't Ms Berry UK-based? Perhaps is a different "standard" to costs - I know the US is sure cheaper than us for a LOT of things.

[Hamlet Au]

Maybe, but Paul Preece, creator of DTD, is also a UKer...

[anu]

Yes, but you also have to think about the difference between DTD and AjaxLife.

DTD is a flash app, so the server basically just needs to serve up the flash app to the client and nothing more.

AjaxLife, on the other hand, acts as a proxy between the client and SL, so the server has to run multiple SL sessions and so is probably far more resource hungry.

[Katharine Berry]

That is the main issue - the requirements of connecting to Second Life are vastly greater than those needed to serve files. Cheaper hosting is possible, but it's not going to be significantly cheaper, and the current approach has some advantages. (Also it works through massively disproportional quantities of bandwidth, given the relatively small number of users - blame SL for that. 90% of that is never passed to you browser)