[geeks] Question: how to profit from a Web-connected server

[microcode at zoho.com]

On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 07:27:08PM -0400, Lionel Peterson wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm curious, what could be done with an Internet-connected server to generate
> revenue WITHOUT any significant hands-on involvement?

I think the webhosting idea somebody mentioned earlier sounds good but it
sounds like it would definitely require a lot of hustle in the beginning.
After that it's probably a gravy train. Set it and forget it.

If you don't want to do that and you don't mind the occasional DMCA takedown
warning you could set up shell hosting on a few different OS. People seem
willing to pay for places to run email and irc bots and most shell hosting
providers don't stay in business very long.

> For example, a Bitcoin machine would be one example, are there any others?

Actually that isn't a very good example. The way things are going you would
lose money mining bitcoins with that server from what I have been reading.

> Assume the hardware is reasonably robust (dual quad-core Xeon w/72 Gigs RAM,
> with a couple TB of RAID 1 storage available).

That's a nice box. I wish I had something like that. Man oh man. Anyway...

I was looking into code hosting possibilities this week. If I had a bunch of
machines and the know-how I would look into what it takes to provide that.
Of course there are sites doing this already but the plans seem to be
either you have to know how many people you're going to collaborate with or
you have to know how many repositories you want them to host. The pricing
quickly gets out of hand if you don't know at the beginning exactly what
you're going to need. I didn't see flexible plans and I didn't see providers
offering other than git (aaargh!) svn and mercurial. Those are popular and
fine but there are enough free solutions for that already and they also
support mailing lists, bug trackers etc.

I think a good code hosting solution for individual developers and small
teams would be a valuable service and you could make ok money. The big money
in code hosting is for corp. use but there are already a few sites in that
space and it looks like an expensive thing to support and obviously would
not be safe to run on one server. It would really be neat to host fossil
repos because it's so easy to do and handles all the stuff you need to write
add-ons for with most (all?) other scms.