Hosting your own Active World Universe requires either a PC running Windows XP, Windows NT (4.0 or 2000), or Linux, or a Sun server running Solaris, and a dedicated 24 hour internet connection.

Note: The requirements listed below apply only to the UniServer and do not include the disk space and bandwidth required to host worlds, and the objects for your worlds. Please see the World Server System Requirements for details.

Hardware Requirements

The Active Worlds UniServer has been designed to use as little RAM, CPU, and disk space as possible. On a typical server, 32 megabytes of RAM should be sufficient for hosting a single Active Worlds Universe, provided no other substantial applications are also running. For systems that are running other applications concurrently (e.g. web servers, world servers, etc.), we recommend a minimum of at least 64 megabytes of RAM, depending of course on the combined memory requirements of the other applications.

Hosting a typical universe should require less than 20 megabytes of disk space. The main factor influencing the disk space requirement of the UniServer is the size of the user base. The more users in the universe, the more data needs to stored on disk to track those users. As a point of comparison, the "main" Active Worlds UniServer hosted by Activeworlds Inc. with over 40,000 registered citizens, uses approximately 25 megabytes of disk space.

The Active Worlds UniServer requires very little CPU power to run. For example, an Active Worlds UniServer with 10 worlds and 100 users in it simultaneously would typically use less than 5% of the CPU of a 400Mhz Pentium.

Bandwidth Requirements

The bandwidth required by the UniServer is quite small. You can estimate the approximate amount of bandwidth required by the UniServer by assuming an average of 50 bytes/sec per user. Thus, for example a UniServer with 100 users in it simultaneously would require approximately 5K/sec of bandwidth.

Again, keep in mind that these estimates do not include the bandwidth required by any world servers and web servers that may also be running over the same connection.

Network Requirements

A static IP address is required. The IP address of the server machine must match the IP address the client connects to. This means NAT routers and proxy servers cannot be used in front of the server machine. Unrestricted access on port 5670 (configurable) is required for clients to connect.