How to Host a High Fidelity Social VR Server for $300/Year on Google Cloud

Here's a detailed tutorial for setting up your own High Fidelity server on Google Cloud, which is now offering a free 12 month $300 credit. (I.E., roughly 1/12th what it usually costs to host a server in Second Life.) The step-by-step guide comes courtesy of Game Loop's Alberto Fonseca, who describes it as a good way of getting started, though not necessarily for hosting a massively packed Thomas Dolby-type live event: 

"I believe you can have around 5 people capacity with that base server but haven’t tried the limit yet," as he puts it. "It’s easy to scale up to more as needed. The $300 is the free credit you get for 1 year. How much of that you spend depends on usage so testing is needed. Base is about $15/mo. [to run] the cloud instance. That would come out of the $300 credit you get for the year so no out of pocket cost until you use up the free credit. It’s free to try for a year to figure those things out and you get a cool sandbox to play with."

Here's the whole tutorial, which is definitely not for beginners, but if you have questions, Alberto has been providing follow-up support in his blog's Comments.

Hat tip -- High Fidelity's Philip Rosedale:

Detailed instructions at this great blog on how to start up a @HighFidelityVR server on @Google Cloud Platform. Very nice.

— Philip Rosedale (@philiprosedale) February 19, 2019

Comments

[Chris]

So basically you can try this for a year to see if this is for you? Pretty good deal really, and you could get a pretty sweet VR world up and running in that time, even with having to follow the tutorials.