Renting a server?

[chocy2646]

So I recently bought a Supermicro Quad node server with 4x (2x (Xeon 8 Core E5-2670 2.6GHz + 32Gb DDR3 ECC RAM)). I have personal plans with 2 of those nodes but have no idea what to do with the other 2. I'm considering renting them out. I may have purchased this without properly thinking it though, but it was pretty cheap when I purchased it.

Does anyone have any ideas about who would want to rent them? Or any opinions about doing this at all? Or anything else I could do with it?

 

Edit: I have a decent internet connection, but if this is worth my time I'd probably get a second internet connection into my house for this specifically

[TheKDub]

Define "decent internet connection".

[Canada EH]

7 minutes ago, chocy2646 said:

who would want to rent them?

No business would want to, but maybe the people you know, or the people in your neighborhood or area you live in.

Perhaps you can just "Fold at home" or do some mining.

[chocy2646]

5 minutes ago, TheKDub said:

Define "decent internet connection".

150/20

[chocy2646]

8 minutes ago, Canada EH said:

No business would want to, but maybe the people you know, or the people in your neighborhood or area you live in.

Perhaps you can just "Fold at home" or do some mining.

Yeah, I'll probably be able to find someone at uni that would be interested in this on compsci. Thanks

[Pixel5]

12 minutes ago, chocy2646 said:

150/20

to be honest i wouldn't pay a single dollar to rent a server with this connection not to mention renting from a private person itself is already something i would never ever do.

if you want to rent a server to someone you will need to have a MINIMUM of 100/100 completely reserved for that one server and with unlimited traffic.

Also a separate static IPV4 IP with full control over the ports if a must.

 

then even if you find someone who is willing to rent from private with zero security the money you could charge would barely cover the cost you have running this thing.

[chocy2646]

3 minutes ago, Pixel5 said:

to be honest i wouldn't pay a single dollar to rend a server with this connection not to mention renting from a private person itself is already something i would never ever do.

if you want to rent a server to someone you will need to have a MINIMUM of 100/100 completely reserved for that one server and with unlimited traffic.

Also a separate static IPV4 IP with full control over the ports if a must.

 

then even if you find someone who is willing to rent from private with zero security the money you could charge would barely cover the cost you have running this thing.

Thanks, you're right, I'll have to find something else to do with it then

[jj9987]

I'll copy one of my old posts here.

 

Quote

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.

And also adding here the security aspect as mentioned by @Pixel5 - you need to ensure that tenants won't reach each other's resources, malicious or not.

 

People don't want to pay if you can't give guarantees. Or if you break them.

 

So, to keep this post a little more productive, I'll give some alternatives:

- Check out /r/homelab on Reddit and see what they are doing.

- Run virtual machines, run servers, break shit, read logs, understand your actions, delete servers, start again.

- Set up home media server. Backup files in a central place.

- Here's a ton of cool stuff to host on your own - https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted

[AbsoluteFool]

To give the most simple answer for this. Your ISP will most likely not like this, and could possible terminate your service for breaking the terms of service.

[beersykins]

In addition to the above, your internet connectivity is at the edge of the internet as opposed to a more centralized data center.

 

The market is pretty saturated with what you're trying to do.  Most people in that situation will just pick up a cheap vps off of lowendbox for sub $1/mo unless they have a specific use case.

[AngryBeaver]

With your internet connection if you really wanted to do something rent wise with these you would need to have them collocated in a data center which is going to cost you money for the rack space. I mean you aren't going to have great options without spending money on some things. You could try to rent them out as a dedicated box, but there are companies out there that do this in large scale you cannot compete with. You could try to launch some cheap game servers, but you will need to be pretty picky as you are going to be ram limited for large doing this in a large scale, plus depending on the drive setup you might have IO issues.

 

I have rented out game servers, but I did it on equipment that was non-standard and more suited for the games I was pushing it for. Your CPU choice is great for being a multi-threaded workhorse, but some games just can't use more than 1-2 servers for the game server client... so this means that you need really high single thread performance which is what you are lacking. 

 

I guess Minecraft servers could be a possibility, but know that 10+ player servers they recommend 4gb of ram (looks like most rented solutions only use 2gb for 50 players and 4gb for 100 players)

 

So if you could rent 7- 100 players Minecraft servers for say $25/m That is only $175/m. Now keep in mind it can cost 100-300/m per U of rack space you use in a colo setup.

 

So then the question is what are you home internet options. Can you get anything faster. Chances are unless you have fiber you aren't going to have the upload you need to make game servers worthwhile. 

 

Anyways in the end I think it is going to be hard to profit much on those two servers. You would probably be better off selling them if you don't need them