Excellent article, Maria!
1 May 2013 marks the 3rd year rezz day of Lani region sim in OSGrid and HyperGrid. The region has been running 24/7 on the servers of the OpenSim hosting company "Dreamland Metaverse" http://dreamlandmetaverse .
During that time, the traffic has increased to an average of about 17,000 visitors per year, with daily visitor traffic of between 25 and 100 avatars... with people doing everything from shopping at the store to 40-avatar party events, or RP sessions flying physical vehicles and teams doing shooting combat.
I readily admit that the kind of traffic, success, and popularity we've seen with Lani region is probably not typical for everyone's regions in OpenSim. However, I make note of it here as an example of a high traffic, high load, OpenSim region sim that relies heavily upon a top notch hosting company service.
I have run my own home OpenSim standalones and a few regions on other computers and hosting services over the years. Comparatively, the performance I see on Dreamland regions is just superb. I highly recommend it for those who are just starting out in OpenSim, and for those who have higher levels of traffic in their regions.
Sim hosting companies are incredibly valuable for land owners who don't have enough internet pipe for a home sim on a public grid, or who don't have the RL time to keep a server updated with stable OpenSim versions all the time.
Lani,
Lani Global
LANI GLOBAL SYSTEMS
OpenSim - OSGrid - HyperGrid - SL