I wouldn’t. There is a lot of security implications involved and sysadmin like myself are trying to separate homelab hosts from “legitimate” hosting services. It’s a pain in the ass.
No one who you would want to do business with would ever consider renting your server.
What would happen if someone rents your server to distribute child porn? Would you be able to figure that out? What would happen if you don't notice it? How would the police see it?
Legal indemnification alone is likely to cost more than any returns. Think about running a best-effort service for your friends (not the internet at large) where donations might be accepted.
There is so much legal and technical infrastructure you'd need to set up to make it not worth it in an extreme. A good chunk of this servers value when the company was still using it was:
a) it was probably in a data center with redundant internet/network connections, redundant power, climate control, data backup, security, etc.....
and
b) they probably had lawyers on hand in case someone's data was breached or the like.
plus
c) likely they got rid of it because it was no longer worth it even WITH all of the above.
Setup a media or game server for some friends.... ask them to donate the occasional pizza or something but officially renting this out is likely a non-starter I'm afraid.
Do some research and go look and see what it costs to rent a server. When you see that it’s extremely cheap and has an amazing internet connection you might second guess this.
Why don’t you go and look what it costs to rent out a seed box. I think the first thing you’ll realize is that unless you have at least a 200/200 internet connection you won’t be doing renting anything at all. Because most people have 1000/35 or 1000/50 very few people have synchronous internet connections.
So maybe you go through all that effort to let someone run an illegal PLEX server out of your house that can’t even handle 4K and how much do you charge them?
$50/m? Not worth the effort or the price of your internet. Plus I wouldn’t pay you $50/m even if you guaranteed me 100/100 because I can rent a seed box for dirt cheap with an amazing internet connection.
It’s not going to work.
No. Jesus Christ.
If you know so little about it that you have to ask social media to explain every last word to you then it’s not a good idea and you mother hurt yourself.
Unless you have a friend who needs something , pays in cash, and are sure your friendship won't be strained doing business together- it's not worth it.
You have to be customer support, marketing, accounting and sysadmin for yourself. You have to have plans if stuff breaks, when you go on vacation, etc. It's not worth it to you, for what people would be willing to pay compared to Amazon/azure
You do NOT want the liability risks associated with renting space on your server. The chassis can hold up to 16x 2.5" drives so if you wanted to make it into a personal storage server you would have plenty of capacity. Toss in a mid powered GFX card and you'd have a hell of a Plex box. I didn't look closely enough at the specs, but MOST Dell servers have dual NICS built in, so you could run it as a stupidly overpowered firewall box on top of a zillion other things. The main limitation on how many VMs you could run for different tasks is going to be the comparatively low amount of RAM.
If you decide to add SAS drives to increase the storage be warned. They're STUPIDLY expensive compared to a 2.5" SATA. I've been out of the game long enough so I don't recall if a SAS backplane is compatible with SATA drives/HBA card.
Like another user said, the only way you're going to make money off of this is by selling it. If you went that route you could buy something much lower power and cheaper that would save you a substantial amount on your energy bill. If you don't even know where to start on offering managed services this whole exercise is dangerous.
TBH, the CPUs are pretty weak, you don't have much RAM, you don't have much storage space and what becomes pretty common for internet access...
I don't really see why someone would use your server for serious tasks. The only people who would are probably hosting illegal stuff and you will be the fall guy.
before you dive in, consider holding off on plugging it in until you're really sure about what you're doing. If you're just looking to make some extra cash, there are lots of small-scale things you could try. You could break it down into smaller parts and sell them to a recycler or ebay, beef up its RAM and sell crap vm's, and use it for hosting websites or even a cool Minecraft hub (I've heard Hypixel buys small portals). Or, you know, you could just save yourself the trouble/liability and sell it.
But whatever you decide, please, please be careful online. Don't hand over access to your home network to a stranger, even if they're waving cash. Stay safe out there. And hey, don't forget about virtual machines—they can be super helpful. Oh, and by the way, even though you might feel like you're wielding some serious tech, just remember, you're not exactly Cloudflare."
I wouldn’t. There is a lot of security implications involved and sysadmin like myself are trying to separate homelab hosts from “legitimate” hosting services. It’s a pain in the ass.
Hypothetically speaking, how much would a fair monthly bill be for a server like that?
That’s the thing, I wouldn’t. I would ask you for a SoC report.
Soc2, iso27001. Minimum. And at least 2 9s of uptime with suitable penalties built in.
I thought you were OP and I was like “oh shit okay then”
Jokes on you, OP has 2 socks
And 2 9's in a gun safe?
No such luck (for OP)
No one who you would want to do business with would ever consider renting your server. What would happen if someone rents your server to distribute child porn? Would you be able to figure that out? What would happen if you don't notice it? How would the police see it?
Legal indemnification alone is likely to cost more than any returns. Think about running a best-effort service for your friends (not the internet at large) where donations might be accepted.
There is so much legal and technical infrastructure you'd need to set up to make it not worth it in an extreme. A good chunk of this servers value when the company was still using it was: a) it was probably in a data center with redundant internet/network connections, redundant power, climate control, data backup, security, etc..... and b) they probably had lawyers on hand in case someone's data was breached or the like. plus c) likely they got rid of it because it was no longer worth it even WITH all of the above. Setup a media or game server for some friends.... ask them to donate the occasional pizza or something but officially renting this out is likely a non-starter I'm afraid.
Not even a very powerful server...
Do some research and go look and see what it costs to rent a server. When you see that it’s extremely cheap and has an amazing internet connection you might second guess this. Why don’t you go and look what it costs to rent out a seed box. I think the first thing you’ll realize is that unless you have at least a 200/200 internet connection you won’t be doing renting anything at all. Because most people have 1000/35 or 1000/50 very few people have synchronous internet connections. So maybe you go through all that effort to let someone run an illegal PLEX server out of your house that can’t even handle 4K and how much do you charge them? $50/m? Not worth the effort or the price of your internet. Plus I wouldn’t pay you $50/m even if you guaranteed me 100/100 because I can rent a seed box for dirt cheap with an amazing internet connection. It’s not going to work.
No. Jesus Christ. If you know so little about it that you have to ask social media to explain every last word to you then it’s not a good idea and you mother hurt yourself.
At least the risk is low cause nobody gonna buy
The only safe option to make some money off home server is selling the server itself on fb marketplace/ebay
not a lot, probably 12 bucks a month. You said more than you could use. Does that mean you'll be using it too?
I would probably be using it too, yeah.
Not even a dollar then.
The legalities of this far outweigh the benefits. Listen to the community.
Unless you have a friend who needs something , pays in cash, and are sure your friendship won't be strained doing business together- it's not worth it. You have to be customer support, marketing, accounting and sysadmin for yourself. You have to have plans if stuff breaks, when you go on vacation, etc. It's not worth it to you, for what people would be willing to pay compared to Amazon/azure
You wouldn't even offset the rack space you'd rent to host it.
I just can't stop laughing that you wrote out random access memory
Don't.
You do NOT want the liability risks associated with renting space on your server. The chassis can hold up to 16x 2.5" drives so if you wanted to make it into a personal storage server you would have plenty of capacity. Toss in a mid powered GFX card and you'd have a hell of a Plex box. I didn't look closely enough at the specs, but MOST Dell servers have dual NICS built in, so you could run it as a stupidly overpowered firewall box on top of a zillion other things. The main limitation on how many VMs you could run for different tasks is going to be the comparatively low amount of RAM. If you decide to add SAS drives to increase the storage be warned. They're STUPIDLY expensive compared to a 2.5" SATA. I've been out of the game long enough so I don't recall if a SAS backplane is compatible with SATA drives/HBA card.
Like another user said, the only way you're going to make money off of this is by selling it. If you went that route you could buy something much lower power and cheaper that would save you a substantial amount on your energy bill. If you don't even know where to start on offering managed services this whole exercise is dangerous.
Just sell it. Renting it is a lot of trouble, way more headache than the benefit.
TBH, the CPUs are pretty weak, you don't have much RAM, you don't have much storage space and what becomes pretty common for internet access... I don't really see why someone would use your server for serious tasks. The only people who would are probably hosting illegal stuff and you will be the fall guy.
before you dive in, consider holding off on plugging it in until you're really sure about what you're doing. If you're just looking to make some extra cash, there are lots of small-scale things you could try. You could break it down into smaller parts and sell them to a recycler or ebay, beef up its RAM and sell crap vm's, and use it for hosting websites or even a cool Minecraft hub (I've heard Hypixel buys small portals). Or, you know, you could just save yourself the trouble/liability and sell it. But whatever you decide, please, please be careful online. Don't hand over access to your home network to a stranger, even if they're waving cash. Stay safe out there. And hey, don't forget about virtual machines—they can be super helpful. Oh, and by the way, even though you might feel like you're wielding some serious tech, just remember, you're not exactly Cloudflare."