Gwyneth Llewelyn

So many reviews, half of them so bad. Makes one wonder how Second Life managed to be around for 22 years if half of its users hate it, right?

Well, here's the catch: no, Second Life isn't an easy platform to join.

By "easy" I mean that if you have the expectation that this is going to be "as easy as Facebook", or, well, to be more precise, "as easy as Roblox"... then the plain and short answer is: No.

Instead, it's a very complex 3D environment, where hundreds of thousands of people interact in a way too vast area (impossible to visit in a lifetime) for random visits to be fulfilling. And because of that complexity, the Second Life Viewer interface is complex, too. Because, in this virtual world environment, you're not just the passive consumer of content: you're the *producer* as well. And that means that all 3D editing tools for interactive content (that includes programming, not only modelling 3D objects) are part of the application as well.

And while models are not exactly movie-quality (with millions of polygons), they are far more detailed than anything such as Minecraft (only cubes) or Roblox (extremely simplified meshes)/Horizon Worlds. On top of that are the dozens of thousands of very talented amateur 3D content creators, who are used to render items with millions of polygons, and attempt to do the same for Second Life — because, well, you *can* do that! The result, of course, is what we popularly call "a lagfest" — the current generation of consumer-grade video cards are not designed to render meshes with million of polygons, each fully textured with four 2K textures (for photo-realistic physics-based rendering), 60 frames per second, on high-DVI (e.g., what Apple calls "Retina") displays.

That's just the tip of the iceberg. Then comes the shock of realisation: there are an almost infinite number of items to be acquired, for the wildest possible usages. The Second Life Marketplace, which only offers a very slight, un-curated view of what is being offered (the majority of content for sale is inside the environment itself) — and even so, it has dozens of millions of items for sale. Back in 2013 (!), some officially released statistics put the number of unique items in the database at 6 billion (yes, with a B). There are many more these days, of course (since all "old" content will *still work*). Open the Inventory in any popular virtual world, and it'll have a few hundreds — perhaps thousands —of items, each neatly placed in the appropriate folder, a simple point-and-click interface to use them. In Second Life, the *average* user has roughly 100,000 items in their inventory — mostly unsorted, since there are far too many categories anyway — with many boasting over 300k(!). Never mind the sheer amount of time required to get all of those — think also about the costs! There are millions and millions of very high-quality freebies — but there are *billions* more of extremely high-end items for sale; and while competition is fierce, and drives prices down (comparable items are much more costly in Roblox, for instance), it's a safe bet that just for your "mildly average-looking avatar" you'll need to spend US$50-100 — often much more. The good thing, of course, is that you don't need to do that in one go — but it sort of accumulates over time (for historical reasons, one item of clothing *usually* costs around US$1, on average).

Each of those, of course, come with their *own* user interface — that is, it's hardly as simple as point-and-click! You get a full mini-user interface as a HUD (heads-up display) which gives you access to more and more and more options. Body and head meshes (sold separately!) are exceptionally complex in that regard; the state-of-the-art heads, for instance, come with (at least) three *separate* configuration systems (HUDs), each giving access to layers and layers of complexity — from the shape, colour, and size of your eyelashes to several layers of lipstick and glitter, and all that while having programmable expressions to suit your mood.

Switch brands, and you get to learn a completely different interface, each as complex as the other, and with a tendency to grow in complexity over the years: the competition is not only in the quality of the designs, but also in how many features get packed in each release. And this is true, from the doorbell on your home, to the flower you wear on your hair. On top of all that, many items can be even manually adjusted — because avatar body shapes are infinitesimally adjustable, so anything you wear or use must be as well.

And you *need* avatars, since this is a *social* world.

So... entering Second Life is not for everybody. Thus the bad reviews: these are from people who simply have no patience for all of the above. It's a huge learning curve.

But it's worth every cent.

When it was time for me to replace my old headset, as I would soon require to do a lot of videoconferencing and needed the highest sound quality I could afford, I asked a friend of mine — a veteran audio engineer — for advice, giving him my comparatively low budget. He did not hesitate to recommend a Corsair Headset for the highest quality in this price range; I had no previous experience with Corsair, so I took his advice — and was pleasantly surprised with the results!

Then I had a technical issue with the microphone, and wondered if I had to replace the headset, which had been bought online. But thanks to the vast Corsair community, plus some external resources from audiophiles, it was quickly established that there were no *physical* issues with the mic; many others have experienced the same issues, and have given several examples on how to sidestep those issues.

This is a bit of what Corsair is: there is a fine dividing line between what is "official support" (using a standard ticketing system) and "community support" (using a vast hierarchy of forums and subforums, covering essentially everything you could ever want to know about Corsair — in several languages). Users tend to rely on both. Support is very reasonably quick in answering (1–2 days in the worst case scenario, and, aye, that happens during the weekend as well), the community may be much faster or way, way slower (obviously it depends on the issue), but, ultimately, it's Corsair's interaction with their real users (as opposed to those potential clients that are merely "wishful thinking" by marketeers and sales people...) which helps them to design new products or update the design/specs of older ones (to accommodate to the users' feedback). They manage to give this sensation that it's the users who ultimately design the products — as if they were custom designs! —which resonates quite closely with the "PC tuner" community, using all sorts of Corsair products to make their PC look unique.

At the end of the day, I can say, with confidence, that I *did* get a high-quality headset for the price I could afford. I'm quite sure that there are far, far cheaper products in the market — white-label products out of China or Amazon Basics — with equivalent characteristics. But where Corsair makes the difference is when you effectively *use* their gear for hours upon hours, and day after day. *Then* you'll notice what ergonomic design really means. Tech specs are important, of course; but just because a brand is able to purchase some mics with good specs and loudspeakers providing a true 7.1 surround experience, and assemble them together for a fraction of the price, that hardly means they can deliver the same thing as Corsair. Those components have to be cherry-picked, sure, but they also have to be integrated into a whole design, done by audio engineers who know exactly what they're doing, and who understand the kind of audience that will use their products — and the expectations they have.

This is what the "Corsair experience" gives you — all that in a product that will last a long, long time, even if used every day for hours upon hours, and which resists being dropped to the ground, having the audio cable yanked out by mistake, or having the cat trimming their nails on the device — the headset was made to endure all that abuse, and much more; nevertheless, you can always buy spare parts, which they will stock for a number of years, making the investment in a Corsair product a wise choice: at the end of the day, if you really manage to break or smash one of the components beyond the ability to repair, you can always get a spare part — that's why their products have a legendary longevity.

Mind you, the headset I've got from Corsair is not really "studio quality". Nevertheless, if it's something that an audio engineer can recommend, it means they can safely trust the quality and reliability of Corsair's hardware. Obviously, you cannot expect the audio quality of a studio device — not for these prices! For an amateur, however, it's several notches above so-called "consumer products". It'll give you semi-professional quality— at the very least. And that's already saying quite a lot!

Easy to use (like it says in the name!), plenty of free stock videos (attribution needed) of average-to-good quality (from real footage to computer generated animations), reasonably good searching for keywords. I have just tried out the free version, which obviously has some limitations, but it should give a good idea on the kind of content they have.

I've been with DreamHost for 15 years now — mostly for their shared hosting offering, where I have no limits on disk space, bandwidth, number of users or domains. I use it as a cheap hosting service for experiments and research — because it's not just about serving HTML files and PHP. In fact, I actually compile Go programmes with a shell which gives plenty of flexibility, in spite of not being root; a lot, however, can still be accomplished, coming much closer to so-called 'managed hosting' than merely offering 'shared hosting'. It's dirt cheap for the number of goodies you get!
And their hosting backoffice has been improved over the years; two decades ago, it was pretty much the best option available. People used to Plesk or Cpanel (or even ISPConfig) don't know what they're missing; DreamHost's backoffice beats them all by far and has done so for years and years (and it's free to use).
Their tech support is legendary and it is still top-notch — experienced professionals who have been working in the industry for years and years. They pro-actively to go through your domains and look for suspicious activity (such as malicious scripts) — something that they do for free, reviewing it through a human (not an automated script!) who will contact you personally in case something is wrong, helping you out to fix any issue which you might have overlooked. And, of course, any tech support request gets fixed in a reasonable time frame; replies are made by warm human beings who love their job instead of just copying & pasting from cold and informal templates; you're even being assigned a person according to your own level of knowledge — which means that an absolute beginner will be put in touch with someone who will be able to explain things in a way that you will understand; while, on the other hand, if you have a very complex request requiring a lot of Linux skills, you'll get a peer to talk to, who will be as proficient as you are, and cut straight to 'tech jargon' if that's what you need to get an answer.
Why haven't I given them a 5-star rating, then?
Well, DreamHost makes an effort, but their shared hosting is not perfect. When you host with them, you get assigned a slot on a Linux box, as well as given access to their vast array of database servers, residing on a completely separate infrastructure. And here is one of the major problems: database access is *slow*. Often I think that the hosting server is unusually slow, but, since you can run 'top' from your shell, you can easily see that this is not the case: it might be loaded, yes, but not OVERloaded (DreamHost will routinely improve their hardware). The only issue is that it might be simply waiting too long for replies from the database server — and that is what will cause a slow response from your domain.
This issue is unfortunately endemic. Because I use WordPress so often (and so do many of DreamHost's customers!), this will require a lot of database accesses. Now obviously things get better when you use some sort of caching software; nevertheless, because this is how things work under WordPress, *some* things will still require database access (even if most content gets cached), and that is the main reason why their shared hosting can be so often painfully slow.
Obviously there are ways to improve this. You can install a PHP-based database-less CMS, for instance (such as Grav); you'll see the benefits immediately, and you'll be surprised at the speed you get that way. You could also use something using SQLite, which will remain locally on the hosting server and not require an over-the-wire connection to the backend servers running MySQL; this gives surprisingly good results, depending, obviously, on how good you are at tinkering with configurations. Because you have some control over the webserver's configuration (within very reasonable limits!), this also means using other software besides PHP (or Python, or Perl...) — I have personally experimented with Go (because it gets natively compiled) and it works very well for my purposes (your mileage may vary...).
And there are two very annoying (but reasonable) limitations with their 'unlimited' hosting service. The first is that backups are *forbidden* (they sell a separate service just for backups) — because you have 'unlimited' disk space, the temptation to use DreamHost's shared hosting as an ultra-cheap backup system (you could even technically run Pydio or ownCloud or something similar to create a private 'cloud'-based service!) is huge, and that means that Dreamhost will also pro-actively run checks to see if you're doing some sort of backing up and warn you to stop doing so or face being expelled for breaking their terms of service.
A similar shortcoming is with the available (shared) memory that you can use. A watchdog process is running all the time finding processes that take too much memory (usually over 256M or so) for too much time — such processes are immediately killed. This makes it very tricky to run things like firewalls and anti-spamming tools from, say, the WordPress backoffice, since most of those scripts will take time to complete and often use too much memory. I also had to rewrite some of my own web applications to use a smaller memory footprint (and thus become a bit slower in the process...), because it's very easy to hit the memory limits (or the running time for a certain process). Forget running IRC servers (or bots...) or any such kind of software; all are technically 'forbidden' under the shared hosting terms of service, and, as said, DreamHost will pro-actively find any attempt to use such software and remove it with a warning (two strikes and you're out!).
Obviously, DreamHost has all sorts of other offerings besides shared hosting; I beta-tested some of them (such as their cloud services, which work very well, are AWS-compatible, but priced much cheaper). For instance, they have 'DreamPress', where your WordPress hosting gets state-of-the-art hardware to run under a managed service without any database connection issues — but the prices, obviously, are far beyond the cost of 'regular' shared hosting. They also have virtual servers and have partnered with another company to offer 'bare metal' servers, if that's what you need. What I've found out is that they are not very competitive beyond shared hosting (where they beat all the competition, offering a LOT more for a very reasonable price) — although their cloud services are possibly a good option in terms of cost/features — since possibly most of the money they make comes from upselling services. However, it's worth to say that they don't aggressively push you towards more expensive offers (unlike other companies). It's just when you complain to tech support that 'things are too slow' or 'processes are dying all the time' that they answer explaining how their shared hosting service actually works, and briefly suggest a different service which would fit your requirements better (alas, for a completely different monthly fee...).
All in all, your relationship with DreamHost will be mostly determined by your own expectations. I tend to tell my own customers that we can provide 'fast, cheap, good' — pick two (of course, all customers want all three). DreamHost is the best choice if you want 'cheap and good' — 'fast' costs premium. But for the kind of needs I've got — the ability to launch literally dozens of experiments, demo projects, and the like — their offerings are pretty much what I'm willing to pay for.
Sure, I also have my own 'bare metal' servers for other purposes, with quite different requirements, and where I can pretty much do what I want with the overall configuration. These are hosted elsewhere — DreamHost's own offerings in that area are sadly completely out of sync with the competition, both in terms of price and features/offered infrastructure.