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Short Term Servers - Any interest?
randvegeta
Member, Host Rep
Are people interested in renting out super cheap servers short term? When I say short term, I mean monthly rentals that may be cancelled by the host later on (perhaps after 3+ months).
I believe there must be a number of providers like us who order servers in bulk and then end up with a whole bunch of gear sitting around not generating anything what so ever. So what if the spare capacity were to be sold on short term leases allowing them to generate at least SOME revenue. When the host has a 'real' customer, the existing user would either need to upgrade by the end of the month, or release the server back to the host.
In this way, for at least a few months, high end servers like Dual Xeon E5s with 128GB+ RAM may be made available for LET type pricing. So long as the fees are greater than the power, bandwidth and IP costs, the otherwise idle server would be able to generate some 'profit'.
Interesting or no?
Comments
No
no
The pricing here is as low as it gets.
That it is, but short term 'lets' open the possibility for even cheaper pricing. For example, we have quite a large stock of E3v5 servers with 64GB RAM and 2x4TB HDDs that would be possible to be lease for $20 - $50 /month depending on the bandwidth and IP requirements.
$20 will interested
$20 seems nice :P
"Are people interested in renting out super cheap servers short term? When I say short term, I mean monthly rentals that may be cancelled by the host later on (perhaps after 3+ months)."
Most hosts, 99% do not have 3 month contracts, but monthly renewals with no contract, so I see no advantage, the minimum 3 month term is actually a disadvantage.
IMO when I saw the thread name I thought you meant short time, as in, weekly or bi-weekly like SYS do in some of their servers.
To sum up, this won't work.
just do a discount for the first 3 months, but exclude perhaps word.
Short time bitcoin mining??
I did not say it was a minimum but a realistic term for which a user may expect to be able to rent the server for.
In our case, we often have dozens of servers in stock and we have an expectation to rent out X amount in any given month. So we can estimate that a good portion would still be unsold in Y months and this would therefore represent an opportunity to generate a little extra revenue for otherwise idle stock.
It is not a fixed term type of deal. It would be monthly or possibly shorter!
As I recall there were data centers in HK doing this about 10+ yrs ago. They were renting out entire racks for HK$3,000 (about US$400) which included IPs and bandwidth. Amazingly cheap for HK! As soon as their DC was full, they started jacking up the price and kicking people out who did not want to pay extra and could be replaced with bigger spending clients.
Now racks in HK often exceed HK$10 with less or worse bandwidth.
I had an idea about bitcoin mining with shitty old ASIC miners that would ordinarily cost more electricity than you would get back in BTC. The idea was to run the machines in the winter in Lithuania (every winter will reach -30 for at least some time) and use the miners as electric heaters. So this would be a good way to heat your home/office at no extra cost while simultaneously mining some BTC.
But using servers to mine BTC would be a waste no matter how cheap the rental is given how ineffective CPU/GPU mining is.
Short term + Lowend
Troubles (for you).
Honestly it does not make sense and if I were you I would avoid it as well (abuses, troubles etc.)
Count me in for a E3v5, 64GB RAM 2x4TB HDDs server for $20/month
$20/3 months sounds sweeter.
$7 dedis?!
I think it could work as long as it is more than a month (2-8 month would probably work), and they message people 1-2 month in advance when they start to be short on non used server, and they need to take back some of their cheap location back to loan it to a real customer, so at least people have some time to back up their thing.
Me too
Abuse is indeed the biggest deterrent to such an offering. However, provisioning can be fairly easily automated so in theory, if you can weed out the abuse, it shouldn't be an issue.
2-8 month guarantee may not be feasible and not desirable.
Bring on 7 dollars dedi with that spec and you shall become the new Debian Lord of LET for a while.
Impossible. The electricity cost alone would be more than that. Especially in HK. In Lithuania? maybe.. And even if one were to have super cheap electricity and make $7 affordable, I'm still talking about using surplus hardware, and I dont know anyone who has that much surplus hardware to become 'Debian Lord of LET'. After all, we gave out something like a thousand free VPS and that didn't seem to do much for us at LET
LET crowd doesn't care the possibility. What summerhosts do is pulling off impossible deals. We are used to that: the impossible deals and jump hosts to hosts.
This is such an audience you are dealing with.
I could use some servers just for the summer.
Understood. Perhaps you should catter the Developer niche, not the Providers itself.
BTW, when a provider rents a server, paid montly, it's always a short-term. They can cancel whenever they wish. So yet, I see no advantage on this yet, unless you do it weekly.
There are providers who do it daily IIRC... Can't remember the name of one I used for quite a few months, to test software, then format and reinstall.
An automated setup would be great too, and it's relatively cheap to do.
All automated, could work very well for you.
You can pm the exact cost (current & upgraded) and I'll see if I can use 'em for development
@MrGeneral OVH also started these weekly deals for their dedi servers. You can rent a big dedi for a week
Mentioned that in my first post here, regarding SYS, wasn't aware that all their dedicated servers were available for such short-term, which is great.
if you have high bandwidth this may suitable for torrent or streaming
That would count as abuse. Most LEGAL torrents/streams have low traffic :P
Keep in mind that if you have many ASICs (apart from the heat generated), you'll get a nice, hefty bill from your hydro utility.