Server to earn a living ??

[OCD-FREAK]

hello everyone,

 

i am looking to set a sever and implement something interesting so i can earn money from it.

 

so what are all your suggestions on the best project i can do in my server to earn me the maximum amount of cash ?

 

P.S i have more than one server and loads of complete computers and laptops.

 

any and all suggestions are more than appreciated.

 

thank you all   

[Electronics Wizardy]

There is no easy way to make money?

 

Get a job in it?

 

Work from home?

 

Hosting isn't a great idea, why would they use you instaed of aws?

[Princess Luna]

I mean as a hobby? you could try serving some game or something... but truth be told nobody with an actual necessity for a server will go to you as professional loads will require far more than you can provide without extreme investments in the first place.

[jj9987]

Can you guarantee a stable power? A stable internet connection/access? What do you do, when one or both of these disappear?

How much will you pay for the electricity? For the internet?

For what price will you provide services? Will it be beneficial, will it bring any profit? 

Why should people choose your service in the first place?

Take into consideration your own time and hardware. How much time is spent on managing the whole thing? How much hardware do you use, what it costs, what do you do in case it dies? Reliable storage?

 

Consumer connections often have very limited possibilities, for example up to single public IP, terms of service limitations etc.

[OCD-FREAK]

31 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

There is no easy way to make money?

 

Get a job in it?

 

Work from home?

 

Hosting isn't a great idea, why would they use you instaed of aws?

i have a solid job, i just want to earn extra money by making use of my servers and computers , iam sure that there is a way that earn me money, as one of my friends used to host games and used to make a huge amount of money equal to my monthly job salary !!!

[beersykins]

Implement the labs you've been yammering about, then you will have the skills to make the cash 

 

Hosting at home is a poor startup since you can't compete with things like hosting in a data center, are limited by connectivity, only have one ISP, are at the edge of the internet instead of the backbone, have to pay for electricity and cooling, lack of redundancy, etc.  Plus there are plenty of cheap VPS hosts that slice off resources at $1/mo or less.

 

It'd be cool to set up an implementation for the knowledge.  If you're good at it you could try your hand at placing the equipment in a colo or something and making it a real service offering.  I'd keep the expectation as a learning exercise until you have the ability to be competitive in the market.

[OCD-FREAK]

3 minutes ago, Princess Cadence said:

I mean as a hobby? you could try serving some game or something... but truth be told nobody with an actual necessity for a server will go to you as professional loads will require far more than you can provide without extreme investments in the first place.

yes but i know people that earn a living from their home servers but they dont share their secrets aarrgghhh 

[OCD-FREAK]

1 minute ago, beersykins said:

Implement the labs you've been yammering about, then you will have the skills to make the cash 

 

Hosting at home is a poor startup since you can't compete with things like hosting in a data center, are limited by connectivity, only have one ISP, are at the edge of the internet instead of the backbone, have to pay for electricity and cooling, lack of redundancy, etc.  Plus there are plenty of cheap VPS hosts that slice off resources at $1/mo or less.

 

It'd be cool to set up an implementation for the knowledge.  If you're good at it you could try your hand at placing the equipment in a colo or something and making it a real service offering.  I'd keep the expectation as a learning exercise until you have the ability to be competitive in the market.

thanks for your humble response especially the "yammering" part i like it.

can you suggest me in detail the best skill developing practice i can do to be great ?  

i would like to start from intermediate to expert . thanks again.

[onlybuilt4cubanxlinx]

Rent out gaming server space. 

[AngryBeaver]

What I have done on the side which was pretty lucrative was use my servers to run game servers for popular games. Then offer whitelisting or other perks on the servers for making donations.

 

You can also offer ingame items or perks for some of these games in a sort of pay to win model which also is lucrative.

 

For example I ran a few ark servers with donation packs. You donated x amount of money and would get a reward. My highest pack was $50. I ran a few of these servers for about 8 months. Between the servers I would average about $500-700 each month. Then again this was only 3 servers.

 

So if this was scaled up I could have definitely made a livable income, but I did this on the side as a experiment mostly and it was more than enough to pay for the bandwidth and electricity costs.

[OCD-FREAK]

1 minute ago, onlybuilt4cubanxlinx said:

Rent out gaming server space. 

thats what my friends do and they earn hell amounts of money as dealers !

but i want to know in detail the stuff that i need to do to earn as much money as possible   

[OCD-FREAK]

10 hours ago, AngryBeaver said:

What I have done on the side which was pretty lucrative was use my servers to run game servers for popular games. Then offer whitelisting or other perks on the servers for making donations.

 

You can also offer ingame items or perks for some of these games in a sort of pay to win model which also is lucrative.

 

For example I ran a few ark servers with donation packs. You donated x amount of money and would get a reward. My highest pack was $50. I ran a few of these servers for about 8 months. Between the servers I would average about $500-700 each month. Then again this was only 3 servers.

 

So if this was scaled up I could have definitely made a livable income, but I did this on the side as a experiment mostly and it was more than enough to pay for the bandwidth and electricity costs.

so with 30 servers, what do you suggest ? can you explain to me in detail what have you done to earn money please, appreciated and thanks alot  

 

10 hours ago, VegetableStu said:

I like that OP has a [bitcoin] tag and no one up to this point suggested cryptocoins and which to mine, LOL

yeah, you are the one who noticed so can you go in detail of what can be done ? thanks and appreciated 

[OCD-FREAK]

3 minutes ago, Ezzy-525 said:

The hypothetical example I posted is one of the illegal ones, as it is a blatant breach of copyright violation. Its essentially the digital version of selling knock-off DVD's.

 

Don't bother with it though, even those guys use actual hosted servers because home internet isn't good enough to stream to any decent amount of people. 

 

I don't know why anyone would buy even gaming server space from a small company, surely you can't compete with the server farms who just rent out unused space from their many warehouses of servers, or maybe you can? 

no i cant, but i just want to  know what the hell was my friends doing with just one server to earn that much money? i mean they proved to me with their paypal transfers that they are actually earning what they are claiming ? 

[mariushm]

The terms of service of your internet connection / subscription probably prohibits hosting game servers.

You also get only one IP address so all your game servers would have the same address - if someone gets pissed off and floods one of your game servers, all your game servers will suffer and your ISP may even disconnect you or change your IP.

 

This stuff is done by renting servers in a datacenter, with lots of cores and memory, then using virtual machines to isolate cores and portions of ram and give each virtual machine a unique IP and so on ... 

 

[AngryBeaver]

Just now, OCD-FREAK said:

so with 30 servers, what do you suggest ? can you explain to me in detail what have you done to earn money please, appreciated and thanks alot  

I was running Ark Servers.  I had a website with a database that links up to a mod in the game which would deploy the items as it saw the user in the database.

 

At first it was done manually, but mods have come a long way since.

 

I mean it doesn't even need to be a game server with a donation or p2w system in place. There are plenty of ways to make money, but they can all be risky if you are trying to rely on them as your sole income. With ark for example their would probably be diminishing returns the more serves you make.

 

You could do a few in ARK and a few in Minecraft...etc. You could just sell game servers for a flat 50 a month for 80 slot servers. There are plenty of ways to make a profit on it, but for most people the price to startup or maintain rented equipment can really hurt the margins. I am fortunate that I have access to 2 year old hardware in the way of servers and machines... which means I have little to no startup cost.

[OCD-FREAK]

1 minute ago, mariushm said:

The terms of service of your internet connection / subscription probably prohibits hosting game servers.

You also get only one IP address so all your game servers would have the same address - if someone gets pissed off and floods one of your game servers, all your game servers will suffer and your ISP may even disconnect you or change your IP.

 

This stuff is done by renting servers in a datacenter, with lots of cores and memory, then using virtual machines to isolate cores and portions of ram and give each virtual machine a unique IP and so on ... 

 

for ip address i have my trick to give a unique ip address to each and every server of my 30 servers, but i want accurate suggestion for the point of my original question please. thanks and appreciated 

[beersykins]

1 hour ago, VegetableStu said:

I like that OP has a [bitcoin] tag and no one up to this point suggested cryptocoins and which to mine, LOL

Mining with CPU has long been not profitable.

[AngryBeaver]

1 hour ago, OCD-FREAK said:

so with 30 servers, what do you suggest ? can you explain to me in detail what have you done to earn money please, appreciated and thanks alot  

It depends. If you have the time and want to do it on a small level then you can manually sell and setup the game servers. If you want to automate it then you need to spend money on the automation tools that will collect money and then setup the host machines for the buyers and also provide them connection information. If you don't want to give them all remote access directly to the machines... then you will need to either configure one of the free game server web consoles or spend the money for something like cpadmin.

 

With only 30 boxes I would suggest going the manual route. Just make sure not to oversell what you have the resources for, Those being Bandwidth, CPU cycles, Ram, Disk space, and disk IO.

 

If you are running like minecraft for example you will get less per server, but can put 20+ game servers on a server provided you have the ram and an SSD raid setup. If you want to do a game like ark, then you might only get 4-5 game servers per server, but you can charge more for them. So lets crunch some theoretical numbers here and I will try to be pretty modest on them.

 

30 servers running ark. You offer 80 slot servers for a fixed rated of 35/m  (cheaper than most and better performance provided you have good hardware and don't oversell a box)

 

so to make sure we have the resources we will go with 4 game servers per box. So 30x4 = 120 game servers at 35/m or $4200/m.  Now we need to look at bandwidth and assuming you have the equipment... you will need a decent 5/5gb line. You might be able to limp by with 2gb, but I wouldn't risk it.

 

So in my area depending on provided that 5gb line would cost me 500ish a month with most providers. Then we need to look at electricity and cooling costs. So lets say you are pulling about 400 watts average per machine (should be moderately close) that is right at 1200 a month in electricity cost not even considering cooling. For cooling add another 150-200 a month.

 

That is 500+1200+200= $1900/m  + 500 (ISP connection) for 2400/m in costs..

 

So 4200 - 2400 = 1800/m in profit.

 

So with that many servers you are average about $2.5/hr. Which is 1800/720 (hrs in month) or $11.25/hr when looked at as a 160hr (8 hr 5 days a week) job. Now you can probably shave down your overhead costs, but they are still going to eat a good portion of your profits... which when people post how much they have coming in each month... they normally fail to post the overhead costs they are going to be paying.

[Christophe Corazza]

Just as a side note - just throwing this out there - you would need a very solid internet connection (especially upload speed/bandwidth) if you consider deploying several servers from your home network.

[Unhelpful]

Honestly? The most money you can make out of it nowadays is selling it.

[OCD-FREAK]

2 hours ago, AngryBeaver said:

I was running Ark Servers.  I had a website with a database that links up to a mod in the game which would deploy the items as it saw the user in the database.

 

At first it was done manually, but mods have come a long way since.

 

I mean it doesn't even need to be a game server with a donation or p2w system in place. There are plenty of ways to make money, but they can all be risky if you are trying to rely on them as your sole income. With ark for example their would probably be diminishing returns the more serves you make.

 

You could do a few in ARK and a few in Minecraft...etc. You could just sell game servers for a flat 50 a month for 80 slot servers. There are plenty of ways to make a profit on it, but for most people the price to startup or maintain rented equipment can really hurt the margins. I am fortunate that I have access to 2 year old hardware in the way of servers and machines... which means I have little to no startup cost.

i already mentioned that i have 30 servers at my disposal. so i need to waste 0 amount of cash, iam just asking for suggestions from everyone 

[Sauron]

With ONE server you won't get anywhere unless you'll use it to sustain an existing business...

2 hours ago, OCD-FREAK said:

so with 30 servers, what do you suggest ? can you explain to me in detail what have you done to earn money please, appreciated and thanks alot  

Probably not much considering consumer tier internet connections are often too slow and unreliable for consistent hosting.

[kasugatei]

Being serious now. Anything p0rn related can generate money. And it is not secret that p0rn providers have top notch equipment because they are earning enough to invest into it and have profit.

[Pixel5]

15 hours ago, OCD-FREAK said:

no i cant, but i just want to  know what the hell was my friends doing with just one server to earn that much money? i mean they proved to me with their paypal transfers that they are actually earning what they are claiming ? 

well if its your friend ask him how he did this.

 

the answer will likely be that he build some kind of community around some game server and implemented some paid function that some CS GO server and stuff offer.

realistically you need to find people dumb enough to pay for it but i doubt this is an easy and fast way to make money.

 

making money is extremely simple, you need to offer something people want to pay for and then find people who are willing to pay YOU for it.

Doing this in practice however is much work and especially with servers you need to invest a few millions in infrastructure before you can compete with the market.

[Pixel5]

13 hours ago, OCD-FREAK said:

i already mentioned that i have 30 servers at my disposal. so i need to waste 0 amount of cash, iam just asking for suggestions from everyone 

the best thing you can do with this 30 servers is sell them and forget your idea, the truth is if you need to ask the questions you asked here you are just not ready to start a business.