The amount of money you can gain from renting out your equipment vs. the electrical cost is not worth the effort you will need to employ to make this work. Especially for these entry-level spec computers. The best way to monetize is to liquidate them into cash and churn that cash into something more profitable, which is not easy, but it works for those who are creative and passionate enough. Another method is to make them do tasks that frees up your time, or you can delegate tasks that will help you. Good luck on your monetization efforts
this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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Because you don't have dozens of ipv4 addresses and you don't give a SLA or a business invoice you have to severely undercut prices.
A VPS with that cpu performance can be rented for free from Oracle or from $2 from ovh.
So you have to rent it to 50 different customers just to break even the electricity price. Impossible
Not to mention bad customers who pay the low fee just to see if you're hackable
You could sell the hardware. That's about it unless you want to save money by self hosting
This. If there was something profitable to do with old computers besides sell them, the ewaste merchants would have figured it out by now
Build a home lab and learn skills that get you a well-paying job.
Sell them second hand, that is the only way you can make money off that old hardware.
Solar panels and mining crypto when the sun is out and electricity is free. Nothing else will bring you any profit. And it's unlikely you'll be able to mine anything in any time length that is useful
This is assuming you already have solar panels. You'd never recoup the costs of purchasing them for this.
It also assumes that you can't directly sell power back to the grid, which without power efficient mining hardware would still be a more valuable thing to do with the electricity.
Not much of an issue today but, eventually grids will have to stop accepting back feeding solar systems. So some day, maybe.
In belgium, eletrical prices are so high that it only takes 7-8 years including the installation costs. Without batteries that is. Batteries would double it, depending on capacity.
But someplace like North Dakota, it would take around 15 years to recoup the investment due to low energy prices and toxic, anti-solar policies paid for by energy companies.
That will bring at least a few cents a year!
Another angle to consider is the liability of you being responsible for the content on your system. Someone could rent your machine to host very illegal content. At which point, as far as the authorities are concerned, it is coming out of your IP from your computer. You might be able to explain it away, or you might not. It’s not a hassle that’s worth the while.
You could try self host some services to reduce subscriptions such as jellyfin or navidrome. You could run a tor relay and accept donations. Host and maintain sites or services for someone. As others have said selling them is probably going to net you the most