One question drmike asked here in the forums has drawn my attention, because in fact I am also facing the same situation. What do you do with empty VPS?
I know virtual servers at the price listed on LowEndBox can sometimes lead to impulse buys. Hey it is cheap! I have this great project coming up and it ought to be on its own server! The next thing you know, I am $6-$7 poorer but am a proud owner of a shining new low end VPS. Except a few weeks down the track that “great project” did not turn out to be too great.
So I am left with a some virtual servers lying around doing nothing. Sometimes they can lie around for a couple months because I prepaid them for up to a year. D’oh. Assuming that you are not interested in using it as a seed box, but would like to use it for something interesting, or useful, or something with minimal effort but generate enough revenue to recoup the cost.
Any good idea?
- 5 Reasons Why You Want a Low End Box - May 26, 2021
- Dead Pool January 2012 - February 2, 2012
- exit(0); - January 19, 2012
A few ideas…
1. Set up OpenVPN to watch Hulu (if the vps is in the US) or iPlayer/SeeSaw (UK)
2. If you have another project with your static content (images etc.) on a different DNS name (e.g. static.example.com) you could set up a caching proxy such as squid or varnish to cut the load on the main server. If you have a few, you could experiment with GeoDNS.
3. Set it up as a MySQL slave for another project and run your mysqldump backups on the slave.
4. Backup your other projects over rsync.
teamspeak server to talk with my friends.
do anyone know a good program like teamspeak with video support?
Make it as a Shoutcast Server!
Use them as DNS boxes – sell private DNS or offer it free with advertising on your site etc? :)
@admin can you make a tutorial about how to setup a DNS server + web interface?
#4 – Google for PowerDNS+PowerAdmin
+1 to ui. PowerDNS would be the easiest with its MySQL backend.
@LowEndAdmin a tutorial would help. why don’t you start making tutorials?
I seed – don’t want to waste this bandwidth i paid for!
Make a server to serve static content with a cookie-less domain.
And what content should I serve? And why cookie-less?
Nethack server!
My Suggestion: Long Running Processing like page scraping, etc.
PowerDNS with MySql would require 256MB. For a a really tiny VPS, use MaraDNS.
Anto, what is seed?
pdns + sqlite :)
can someone make a good tutorial about MaraDNS for Debian?
please!!!
Host a Bitfighter server!
Hmm that’s interesting. What kind of resource requirement for a bitfighter server?
How about use the VPS as back-up storage for your production server? rsync can be easily setup via cron to run hours after midnight.
use it as seedbox. or private torrent tracker. or make it a tunneling server xp
i have a maradns tutorial up on my site atm (philderbeast.com), i have been running it for both my primary and secondary dns for a while now and its REALLY light weight (<200kb)
I am buying VPSes to donate bw and time for the Tor Project. It depends on BW, but every bit helps.
http://www.torproject.org/
Set BW limits according to your aloted BW and you wont have surprises like overcharge.
If it is a larger VPS, maybe one could install BOINC and run SETI or Rosetta or ClimatePrediction or something.
@C — that would be a pretty anti-social behavior to take all available CPU on a shared environment. I’ll leave SETI at home on my own computers, thanks :)
@LowEndAdmin – LOL true. XD I admit that my understanding of how VPS works is pretty sketchy, and I had thought that each container gets its own personal allocation of CPU time.