Re-purpose old servers to server hosting companies

[sibbeast]

Hi everyone,

I have a few servers at home that are collecting dust. I wanted to know if there is a way that I could be able to reuse these servers to good purpose.

I've seen lots of companies that offer server hosting services online which includes game servers and GPU servers.

What I am asking is the following: are there data centres or hosting companies online that would like to run services (like un-managed servers, or non-dedicated servers) off my servers if I set them up at home and maintain them? 

EDIT: Secondary question - could the servers be repurposed as gaming servers and advertised on forums. 

 

Edited August 23, 2019 by sibbeast
Added a follow up question

[Radium_Angel]

8 minutes ago, sibbeast said:

few servers at home

How old are they?

Tower or rackmount?

[mariushm]

8 minutes ago, sibbeast said:

 

What I am asking is the following: are there data centres or hosting companies online that would like to run services (like un-managed servers, or non-dedicated servers) off my servers if I set them up at home and maintain them?

The answer would be no.

Companies that offer dedicated servers and hosting most of the time lease hardware (basically rent to own, pay monthly fees for 2 years and then they own the hardware, or something like that).

after that period, the hardware is basically free and the only costs are the electricity bill, the bandwidth and the occasional hardware replacement (like replacing a mechanical drive) - this is how some companies can offer dedicated servers for 30-50$ a month: the hardware is already paid. 

Of course, by that time there's new hardware which has lower power consumption and higher performance, so it makes sense to replace them for increased performance per electricity and rack space.

Electricity is something they can't work around, it's kind of a fixed cost... bandwidth is averaged across thousands of servers so it costs little.

You at home don't have redundant power grid, so it costs you more in electricity to keep the servers running, and they won't pay your power bill. Also, your internet connection is not as reliable as what they have in datacenter, where they can have internet from multiple providers or route data to various peers depending on the amount of money you're willing to pay.

Also, your home connection has only 1 static IP address, maybe you can get 2 IPs or a bunch with a business internet account... typically a dedicated server receives a reservation of 4 IP addresses or something like that... in case customer wants to add servers, they can add them to same group of IPs or join together two segments of four IPs and keep customer happy.

IN addition to this, your ISP gives you an IP from a few classes that are registered voluntarily to anti email spam services... basically any email server would instantly reject any email coming from a mail server running on your home internet IP address. So, even if some nut plans to run servers at home, they won't be able to reliably send emails - they'd have to use a service like sendgrid or google email to send emails. 

 

So nah, too much of a hassle. You can rent a rack in some datacenter if you want and pay a monthly bill to have the servers running there and then find clients for your aged servers ... a rack will probably cost anything between 2-300$ a month and $2-5k a month, depending on power allotment and bandwidth you reserve.

 

[sibbeast]

1 hour ago, mariushm said:

The answer would be no.

Companies that offer dedicated servers and hosting most of the time lease hardware (basically rent to own, pay monthly fees for 2 years and then they own the hardware, or something like that).

after that period, the hardware is basically free and the only costs are the electricity bill, the bandwidth and the occasional hardware replacement (like replacing a mechanical drive) - this is how some companies can offer dedicated servers for 30-50$ a month: the hardware is already paid. 

Of course, by that time there's new hardware which has lower power consumption and higher performance, so it makes sense to replace them for increased performance per electricity and rack space.

Electricity is something they can't work around, it's kind of a fixed cost... bandwidth is averaged across thousands of servers so it costs little.

You at home don't have redundant power grid, so it costs you more in electricity to keep the servers running, and they won't pay your power bill. Also, your internet connection is not as reliable as what they have in datacenter, where they can have internet from multiple providers or route data to various peers depending on the amount of money you're willing to pay.

Also, your home connection has only 1 static IP address, maybe you can get 2 IPs or a bunch with a business internet account... typically a dedicated server receives a reservation of 4 IP addresses or something like that... in case customer wants to add servers, they can add them to same group of IPs or join together two segments of four IPs and keep customer happy.

IN addition to this, your ISP gives you an IP from a few classes that are registered voluntarily to anti email spam services... basically any email server would instantly reject any email coming from a mail server running on your home internet IP address. So, even if some nut plans to run servers at home, they won't be able to reliably send emails - they'd have to use a service like sendgrid or google email to send emails. 

 

So nah, too much of a hassle. You can rent a rack in some datacenter if you want and pay a monthly bill to have the servers running there and then find clients for your aged servers ... a rack will probably cost anything between 2-300$ a month and $2-5k a month, depending on power allotment and bandwidth you reserve.

 

Hey

Thanks for your response. I understand what you're saying. I guess I'll let them gather dust. 

Actually, another question: could these servers be repurposed as gaming servers and advertised somewhere? Maybe on the forum? 

 

[sibbeast]

1 hour ago, Radium_Angel said:

How old are they?

Tower or rackmount?

Rack mount servers. 

About 3/4 years old. 

[Kisai]

6 hours ago, sibbeast said:

Hi everyone,

I have a few servers at home that are collecting dust. I wanted to know if there is a way that I could be able to reuse these servers to good purpose.

I've seen lots of companies that offer server hosting services online which includes game servers and GPU servers.

What I am asking is the following: are there data centres or hosting companies online that would like to run services (like un-managed servers, or non-dedicated servers) off my servers if I set them up at home and maintain them? 

EDIT: Secondary question - could the servers be repurposed as gaming servers and advertised on forums. 

 

 

Anything older than 5 years would not be re-purposed. Businesses buy (or rather lease) new hardware because that's how tax incentives are aligned. At best, you might be able to sell old equipment to people who already have space in a data center. But because of power requirements, it's going to be an issue to put equipment into an existing rack that hasn't the power to run it. My servers in California for example, only 4 of the servers in the 42U rack can be powered because it only has one 15A circuit. So if it comes down to new equipment or old equipment, I'd rather purchase new equipment within the same power envelope. 

[LogicalDrm]

-> Moved to Servers and NAS

[AngryBeaver]

15 hours ago, sibbeast said:

Hey

Thanks for your response. I understand what you're saying. I guess I'll let them gather dust. 

Actually, another question: could these servers be repurposed as gaming servers and advertised somewhere? Maybe on the forum? 

 

You can turn them into game servers for sure, but the biggest factor here would be what your home connection speed is. If you aren't able to break 100+ Mbps on the upload side then you are going to be very limited on what you can run. Even then you will need to make sure you are picking games that are compatible with your hardware. So for example don't try to run high pop ARK servers on a server cpu that doesn't have 3.6+ ghz. Don't try to host a lot of minecraft servers if you only have 8gb of ram..etc.

 

[djlithium]

On 8/23/2019 at 2:11 PM, sibbeast said:

Rack mount servers. 

About 3/4 years old. 

What are their configurations?

[Donut417]

On 8/23/2019 at 3:19 PM, sibbeast said:

Hi everyone,

I have a few servers at home that are collecting dust. I wanted to know if there is a way that I could be able to reuse these servers to good purpose.

I've seen lots of companies that offer server hosting services online which includes game servers and GPU servers.

What I am asking is the following: are there data centres or hosting companies online that would like to run services (like un-managed servers, or non-dedicated servers) off my servers if I set them up at home and maintain them? 

EDIT: Secondary question - could the servers be repurposed as gaming servers and advertised on forums. 

First of all for the love of god, remember us dark theme users. DONT USE BLACK TEXT. 

 

Running servers off your home internet connection could be a violation of the ISP's TOS. The ISP would have grounds to terminate your connection. Besides that, most companies wont want to do this type of set up. Because if your paying for hosting, you expect there to some sort of support if things go wrong. Even if its for a gaming server. Also data centers would have internet connections with SLA's meaning that down time would be limited. While your home connection has no such agreements. 

 

If I were you Id find a way to repupose the servers for your use. I repurposed my old gaming rig as a Plex server. So there are things you can do. If not, try selling them on Facebook or ebay. Some one might give you a few bucks and be able to put them to use.