Obtained a server, best thing to do with it?

I've obtained a server (for free) and I'm wondering what I can do with it to earn a bit of extra cash.
I was going to build a couple of VMs and offer a botting VPS server, with Windbot days included, since I have control of the server, I'd assume this would be a bad idea as lack of trust etc. Which is understandable.

Anyway, here's the specs and current config (I can keep this or scrap it and start over)

Xeon X5450 Quad @ 3.0Ghz
16Gb Ram
2 x 837Gb Raid Arrays
2 x Seperate Raid 5 Arrays.
Each one has 3 x 450Gb SAS 15k disks in, giving two seperate 837Gb Virtual disks.

Currently has windows server 2008 on it

I've seen a few technical guys around here, one who stands out is @XtrmJosh - maybe I'm wrong, but I enjoy reading your replies.

Blimey, I could have some fun with it, but making money is not my strong point. If you wanted to involve Tibia into it (or even WindBot), you could offer to host some chat servers or navigation servers for bots. I'm sure there is some small demand for WindBot navigation servers which people would happily pay for (as well as magebot ones, naturally)... Wouldn't be a lot and would hardly use any of your resources but money is money and you could pack a lot of navigation servers into that machine. You could even offer SSH tunneling also depending on server location and network stability. There's always the possibility of offering shared hosting too which can be profitable but requires a lot of knowledge and it's a pretty saturated market.

The first thing I would probably do is re-image it to Ubuntu 16.04 server edition anyway, unless you're going to bot on it I never recommend running Windows server, it's just painful to work with when you have to do everything via a UI. Beyond that, you could install all sorts of bot software to level up accounts (I'm thinking maybe Pokemon Go bots?) and maybe get some money that way...

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Originally Posted by XtrmJosh

Blimey, I could have some fun with it, but making money is not my strong point. If you wanted to involve Tibia into it (or even WindBot), you could offer to host some chat servers or navigation servers for bots. I'm sure there is some small demand for WindBot navigation servers which people would happily pay for (as well as magebot ones, naturally)... Wouldn't be a lot and would hardly use any of your resources but money is money and you could pack a lot of navigation servers into that machine. You could even offer SSH tunneling also depending on server location and network stability. There's always the possibility of offering shared hosting too which can be profitable but requires a lot of knowledge and it's a pretty saturated market.

The first thing I would probably do is re-image it to Ubuntu 16.04 server edition anyway, unless you're going to bot on it I never recommend running Windows server, it's just painful to work with when you have to do everything via a UI. Beyond that, you could install all sorts of bot software to level up accounts (I'm thinking maybe Pokemon Go bots?) and maybe get some money that way...

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Thanks for the awesome reply.
I was thinking perhaps making a paladin bot farm, making like 5 paladins on each optional pvp world?
Do you think this could be profitable?
I'm wondering what the energy cost would be of the server, though. To run it 24/7.

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Originally Posted by Excape

Thanks for the awesome reply.
I was thinking perhaps making a paladin bot farm, making like 5 paladins on each optional pvp world?
Do you think this could be profitable?
I'm wondering what the energy cost would be of the server, though. To run it 24/7.

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It would probably work out to be profitable but it's hard to say really. It will cost money to start with, but eventually pay for itself (will start to turn a profit after a couple weeks I guess). I was running 4 RPs on one account at peninsula tomb making about 5k/h profit. It's not much but the chars were on the same account and I was pulling off 5k/h every hour for the best part of 3 weeks without any interruption. I stopped eventually as I switched to Linux as my main desktop OS and never migrated those bot chars. It was working out to like 3.5kk profit per month which covered prem at the time and 1kk of "real profit".

The energy cost can easily be calculated, just check the PSU. You'll probably never use 100% of what the PSU is capable of delivering, but it'll give you an idea. Power is generally sold in kWh which can be calculated as the number of kilowatts used in an hour. If your powersupply is 600W, that's 0.6kW, meaning it will use .6kW per hour. I think. In that instance, it would cost about £0.12 GBP at my current electricity rate. One of the hardest things is, in my opinion, working out how much a kWh of electricity costs...

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Originally Posted by XtrmJosh

It would probably work out to be profitable but it's hard to say really. It will cost money to start with, but eventually pay for itself (will start to turn a profit after a couple weeks I guess). I was running 4 RPs on one account at peninsula tomb making about 5k/h profit. It's not much but the chars were on the same account and I was pulling off 5k/h every hour for the best part of 3 weeks without any interruption. I stopped eventually as I switched to Linux as my main desktop OS and never migrated those bot chars. It was working out to like 3.5kk profit per month which covered prem at the time and 1kk of "real profit".

The energy cost can easily be calculated, just check the PSU. You'll probably never use 100% of what the PSU is capable of delivering, but it'll give you an idea. Power is generally sold in kWh which can be calculated as the number of kilowatts used in an hour. If your powersupply is 600W, that's 0.6kW, meaning it will use .6kW per hour. I think. In that instance, it would cost about £0.12 GBP at my current electricity rate. One of the hardest things is, in my opinion, working out how much a kWh of electricity costs...

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750w power supply (well 2 but I'll only plug one in)
£0.12 cost here too

I've just purchased a plug in meter so I'll probably use that and check how much it costs

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Originally Posted by Excape

750w power supply (well 2 but I'll only plug one in)
£0.12 cost here too

I've just purchased a plug in meter so I'll probably use that and check how much it costs

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That number is the "upper limit", it's what the PSU is capable of supplying consistently as a maximum. Chances are if you're not maxing the CPUs and throttling the disks you'd be lucky to reach half of it. It's a good way to get a baseline estimate though. If it's £0.12 per hour, you can calculate that it's £2.88 per day or £20.16 per week. If you take my estimate that you'd be lucky to use half as your upper limit, £10 per week is pretty cheap if you can run a decent sized farm on it and pull in a decent amount of cash. To be honest, though, these numbers don't quite sound right to me. My electricity bill comes to about £40 per month and I have 1x850W PC running 24/7 (often running at 700W draw measured), as well as a 450W PC and a few 350W microservers. By the math above I should easily be spending £80 a month so maybe I fucked something up. Would be interested to know what your meter says :P

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Originally Posted by XtrmJosh

That number is the "upper limit", it's what the PSU is capable of supplying consistently as a maximum. Chances are if you're not maxing the CPUs and throttling the disks you'd be lucky to reach half of it. It's a good way to get a baseline estimate though. If it's £0.12 per hour, you can calculate that it's £2.88 per day or £20.16 per week. If you take my estimate that you'd be lucky to use half as your upper limit, £10 per week is pretty cheap if you can run a decent sized farm on it and pull in a decent amount of cash. To be honest, though, these numbers don't quite sound right to me. My electricity bill comes to about £40 per month and I have 1x850W PC running 24/7 (often running at 700W draw measured), as well as a 450W PC and a few 350W microservers. By the math above I should easily be spending £80 a month so maybe I fucked something up. Would be interested to know what your meter says :P

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That's true, the numbers look a bit scary haha. I guess 1000 coins is like £20, so 500-1000 coins a week to pay for itself. I guess that could be achievable.
I guess the best way would be to plug it in, attach it to the monitor and see how much energy it uses. It's not at my house atm, so when I pick it up, I'll update the thread.

@XtrmJosh
Put it on finally, running around 400watts... loud as a motherfucker so I doubt I will be keeping it on 24/7 lol

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Originally Posted by Excape

@XtrmJosh
Put it on finally, running around 400watts... loud as a motherfucker so I doubt I will be keeping it on 24/7 lol

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Heh yeah, server builders tend to really not care about noise... I actually have an HP ProLiant Gen8 Microserver behind me though, which is specifically designed for home use, and it's quiet as a whisper. Wouldn't even know it's running... In the past I had access to 2x HP Blade servers, super old things using IDE for the HDD slots... Those things sounded like jet engines on boot.

The best way to earn money is botfarm on new servers, coins there is like 1k each, you would've to spend money to buy pacc but the return would be insane

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Originally Posted by downloadkct

The best way to earn money is botfarm on new servers, coins there is like 1k each, you would've to spend money to buy pacc but the return would be insane

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What about the optional pvp servers?
If this is the case on optional pvp servers, i'll make 4 accs right now and prem them all.

The coins on new opt-servers are costing a bit more, like 1.5k each coin

It's 2k per coin on Tavara, no idea about others

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Originally Posted by downloadkct

The coins on new opt-servers are costing a bit more, like 1.5k each coin

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Hmm, I have a 64 day voucher account. I could use like 5 days and get level 100, make a ton of cash on a RP and buy coins... Not sure how long they will stay so low, though.

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Originally Posted by Eberhard

It's 2k per coin on Tavara, no idea about others

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Hmm, slighly more costly haha. I guess it's still mega cheap, though.