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?
LEA (LowEndAdmin) is the original founder of LowEndBox and the visionary who gave rise to an entire movement around minimalist, efficient hosting. In 2008, LEA launched LowEndBox with a simple but powerful idea: that it was possible to run meaningful applications, web servers, VPNs, mail servers, and more – on small, low-cost virtual machines with minimal resources.
At a time when most infrastructure discussions were dominated by high-end servers and enterprise platforms, LEA championed the opposite approach: lightweight Linux distros, self-managed servers, open source software, and thoughtful optimization. This philosophy gave birth to the term “Low End Box”, which would come to define a new genre of hosting tailored to developers, tinkerers, and budget-conscious users around the world.
Through LowEndBox and its companion forum, LowEndTalk, LEA built the foundation for what would become one of the most active and enduring communities in the hosting world, prioritizing knowledge-sharing, transparency, and accessibility.
After several years of nurturing the site and community, LEA stepped away from active involvement, passing the torch to a new generation of admins, contributors, and moderators. Today, LEA remains a respected figure in the LowEnd ecosystem, credited with launching a platform and philosophy that continues to influence thousands of infrastructure providers and users globally.
LowEndBox’s legacy, and its thriving community, is a direct result of LEA’s original vision.
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.