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What is the best way to utilise $10K worth of free servers for an year?
- intrepidkarthi 10y agoI have free server credits of $10000 which should be utilised with in a year from a famous hosting provider. I can run machines with 64GB RAM and with multiple cores for that prize. How can I utilise it in the best way? I am a programmer myself. I am looking for suggestions and also collaborations.
- AznHisoka 10y agoNot BitCoin (before someone posts this)
- cocotino 10y agoWhy not?
- mastermojo 10y agoIt's not very efficient compared to specialized mining hardware. I haven't done the math but your return will probably be <<1% of the credits.
- cocotino 10y agoWell, it's free servers, so whatever he can get out of them will be good.
- popey456963 10y agoI believe (from rumours of friends) that most servers actually ban bitcoin mining on their system anyway.
- smilingtom 10y agoOnly the naive believe something is "free"
- intrepidkarthi 10y agoI can run two machines with 64GB RAM & 20 Core CPUs for the whole year 24/7. Do you still think the return will be less than 1%? I am just wondering how others do mining.
- intrepidkarthi 10y agois there a reason?
- brink 10y agoHow much would someone even stand to make running Bitcoin hashing 24/7 in this scenario? Not much I'd imagine.
- _RPM 10y agoTry to start a hosting business??
- intrepidkarthi 10y agoIt is a hard sell market
- fapjacks 10y agoRight, exactly. Not only that, but the industry is basically 98% scumbag confidence men and thieves (e.g. any number of brands run by Colo-Crossing). You will be trying to make a name for yourself in a field dominated by some of the worst people you'll ever meet. Even if you make it out of the cesspool to the top and start competing with businesses that are more or less honest (because they make enough of a margin through volume that they can afford honesty), you're competing with the likes of Digital Ocean, Ramnode, Linode, OVH, or even AWS, Rackspace, Google, Azure, etc. Basically, people that know what they're doing and have pretty loyal customers (loyal because of having dealt with the dishonest majority of hosting providers). If you do decide to go this route, managed hosting service with some kind of bespoke development (e.g. web development) services is probably your best bet, and don't skimp on the customer service even once. I mean, do whatever you want, but as someone that's had to work with this industry for fifteen years, I recommend against starting a hosting business.
- mikexstudios 10y agoMirror Sci-Hub
- intrepidkarthi 10y agois it legal?
- summarite 10y agoSadly not
- chrisbennet 10y agoWhat if you didn't use it at all? Suppose you won 1,000 gallons of gas but you had to use it in a year, would you figure out ways to burn it by driving extra, etc? With the gas scenario, the external "costs" (pollution) are obvious but running a server isn't free (of external costs) either. Just a thought.
- monochromatic 10y agoI'd sell it or find a way to use it profitably. I wouldn't drive around in circles, but I also wouldn't just say "no thank you."
- intrepidkarthi 10y agoWhen I know how to drive faster, I will definitely burn all the gas as fast as possible. I will just improve my driving skills at the end.
- lujim 10y agoWhat if you used the 1000 gallons of gas to run a free carpool with the explicit goal of saving 6 people per day a drive to and from work and in the process saved 6000 gallons. You funded your project through a blog and social media campaign dedicated to awareness of fossil fuel pollution and sold ads only to solar companies and bike manufacturers. In would later estimated that your 1000 gallon investment created enough good will and awareness to save an estimated 10000 gallons per year and launched you a new career as a pro green/solar consultant. What then buddy?
- mankash666 10y agoSell the access credentials for, say $5K to someone who really wants it. Win-win
- intrepidkarthi 10y agoThat will be the least possible decision. I would like to utilise and learn out of it. Not much interested towards monetary benefits.
- mankash666 10y agoLearning doesn't really require $10K of cloud credit. However, maybe you can combine your intention to learn and help out someone with a need for cloud computing by volunteering for their project. Many good projects, some open source, need this kind of computing access.
- rahimnathwani 10y agoIf learning is your primary goal: Your time is the most important investment. If you want to learn, decide what you want to learn. If the cloud credits can help with that (e.g. if you want to learn about large scale deployment, or practice tuning ML models), then great. If not, just ignore the credits and spend time as you would have without them.
- maerF0x0 10y agogrow your business, optimize for growth vs efficiency.
- intrepidkarthi 10y agoI already have a business that runs smoothly with existing servers. This came across for free of cost. I am just thinking ways to utilise it properly.
- maerF0x0 10y agosome options: New services, additional capacity, new ways of doing things that make your existing business better for customers. Get them to pay for it so you convert $1 server credit into $1 or more of money in your pocket.
- intrepidkarthi 10y agoYes, I will think about it.
- zelon88 10y agoI would be weary of this decision. Adding capacity sounds great, but lets assume you begin utilizing all this extra capacity for business needs. Before you know it you are going to depend on the extra capacity, and when this one-year offer has ended you will either need to pay to keep this capacity, or contract your network back to original size again. If you used the extra capacity to take on more clients, you may run into customer service impact when it's time to say goodbye to the free servers. That is not to say you couldn't bolster your capacity until then or try to diversify your business a little bit, but be weary incorporating all of it into something you're going to miss later.
- _RPM 10y agoAlso give me an SSH account...
- runtoronthem 10y agoRun Tor! https://www.torproject.org/ https://www.torproject.org/
- intrepidkarthi 10y agoInteresting option. Will I learn anything or beneficial to me in anyway apart from helping the TOR community?
- runtoronthem 10y agoParticipate and learn what ever you like... https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en
- intrepidkarthi 10y agoThanks buddy. I will go through
- revicon 10y agoIs bitcoin mining still practical these days?
- stevefeinstein 10y agoThe problem as I see it is you have a year to create a something that will generate $10K in revenue annually or you will go quickly into the red and have to shut it down. I'm not sure what you can learn with $10,000 worth of servers that you can't learn with $1,000 worth and an amazon AWS account. If it's just you, you won't need to scale up for a while and AWS is super cheap. Convert it to as much cash as you can, then spend it more economically on a service with no time restrictions on the use of the resources.
- alphydan 10y agoOffer free minecraft servers for coding teachers running this course: https://github.com/teachthenet/TeachCraft-Challenges https://github.com/teachthenet/TeachCraft-Challenges (cough, cough, ... I could use one)
- pesfandiar 10y agoCreate a public VPN service for unfortunate people behind state-run firewalls. Maybe only serve educational and news sites if you are worried about abuse. This way you can do good while learning something (new technologies, automating a possible whack-a-mole game with the censors, etc.)
- nextweek2 10y agoThis is almost a dupe from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9546609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9546609 Really you need to create a start-up which offers value to someone, the fact you have 1 year of hosting is nice but it should only be a small part of a larger business plan. Look for ideas [1][2] but most importantly, look at what you are good at. Lastly, go as fast as you can. A year is a very short time. [1] http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html [2] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+ideas&t=ffcm&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+ideas&...