Any Ideas how to generate money from a server to cover electric costs?

Forum Networking : General Discussion Any Ideas how to generate money from a server to cover electric costs?

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I have a server that is on 24/7, I love it, but the problem is it costs about $25 in electricity, to keep it running 24/7. Is there anyway to generate some income with it to help out with the power requirements? First things that comes to mind is web hosting, but sadly I only have a 256 KB upload speed, and my ISP doesn't like servers (Not that is has stopped me ).

Message edited by Catsrules on 11-06-2011 at 06:02:44 AM

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Bitcoin?

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I'm in the same situation and basically just accept the hit. Unless you're ready to start a business (like hosting), and which really requires a business class connection ($$$), there's not much you can really do. $25 sound like quite a hit. I'm more like $11/month, so it's not something I'm overly concerned about it.

As far as bitcoin, certainly one avenue, although the market on these as sort of slipped lately (the novelty is starting to wear off), and you're highly unlikely to generate anywhere near enough to cover your costs. And a working machine uses more electricity, so it can be counter-productive.

I’ve considered putting my drives to sleep at times, but the problem there is that this can dramatically reduce the lifespan of your drives if you’re constantly bringing them up and down. And so there is some replacement costs associated w/ this solution.

The best approach is just to build-in your savings w/ the most energy efficient components you can find (high efficiency PSU, slower spinning 5400rpm drives, on-board video rather than discrete video card, etc.). Perhaps too see if you can determine if you have periods of time where you can afford to put the server to sleep, even for a few hours, perhaps using a scheduler.

There might be some indirect means to cut costs. For example, let’s say you use an online backup service like Carbonite. About $55/year, last I checked. Well, if you found a friend w/ a similar need, you could use Crashplan instead and backup to each other’s systems (which is free). Having a 24/7 server would be ideal for this type of arrangement. Granted, not a huge sum, but it’s better than nothing.

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Reply to eibgrad

eibgrad wrote :

The best approach is just to build-in your savings w/ the most energy efficient components you can find (high efficiency PSU, slower spinning 5400rpm drives, on-board video rather than discrete video card, etc.). Perhaps too see if you can determine if you have periods of time where you can afford to put the server to sleep, even for a few hours, perhaps using a scheduler.

Haha, Yeah that is my problem, I was not thinking about power requirements when I designed this thing. (haha "designed" that makes sound like I actually knew what I was doing when I bought it) any ways I am using an old Dell poweredge 2850 that alone takes about 350 Watts idle. And it has 2 72GB 15000RPM drives and 4 146GB 10000RPM Drive. Then I ran out of HD space, so I got a SAN to add more HD, that takes another 120-150 Watts, So I am using about 500 Watts just sitting there on.
And sadly VMware ESXI doesn't support sleeping, as far as I know, So I am kinda stuck there.
I wish I knew the power requirements before I bought all of this or I might have just built me a little core i3 server, that takes under 200 watts.

At the moment the only thing I can think of is take advantage of it and uses it as much as possible , So far it is a download server, media server, file server, FTP server, Web server, PBX server (FREE phone from Google voice!!!), RDP server, FOG server, Air Video server, and video converter.

I was looking in to BitCoin, but it sounds like the only way to really get it to work, is with a good video card, and my poweredge has some stupid integrated one that has like 8 megs a memory, So I won't be playing crysis or mining any bitcoins with that, anytime soon . I guess I could look for a PCI or PCIx video card, but I don't know if ESXI will pass the hardware acceleration to the guest OSs.

Message edited by Catsrules on 11-06-2011 at 10:51:59 PM

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Any Ideas how to generate money from a server to cover electric costs?

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