There is a lot of testing and experimenting with VAR regions (scalable, and not a "megaregion"). You can read up on the VAR wiki page on how to create one, find tips on migrating your existing regions etc. If you want to visit / check one, try popping by Event plaza, or Jurrasic park regions. VAR is a work in progress, so expect minor glitches that can impact anyone. Like, don't be surprised if you can read chat conversations in neighbouring sims all over sudden, or if on a var, terraforming is a bit chunkier than usual. Performance wise, on the loadtest i attended VAR runs like a charm. Bugs are being squashed at each new update. Red Dragon will remain on single regions for the time being. as i don't want to load 150K+ prims on a VAR just yet.According to hypergridbusiness who vigorously collect stats on as much grids as they can, the top 40 of opensim based grids dropped by a 5000 regions, due to some housekeeping and spring cleanup. People come people go, but overall OSgrid seems to become more active again, more events are hosted, more clubs and DJ's are active, and a steady flow of new people is setting up and building their new regions.
Dev's are figuring out ways to get around the issues with NAT loopback, as apparently in the US & UK the ISP's love to hand out "poor mans" routers that don't support it, or have it disabled in their firmwares. (in general, and i think globally ISP's don't like you to run servers on home connections).
My advice is to buy & run a decent router if you plan to host a server. And although, it really sucks not being able to run your own region without "buying stuff first", it's well worth it, and generally not "unaffordable". A list of supported routers is found here. Mind there are much more supported, than unsupported routers, and you can find them from € 15 / $ 18 and up already, depending on your further requirements. Also make sure to properly troubleshoot your connection, before running to the store. In 95% of the "problems" i've seen in the past 4 years it's misconfigurations and not NAT loopback causing problems.
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