Hey! So I have two spare computers, with 7th gen i5s and 16GB of ram. What would be the best way to try and monetise them? I’ve found one or two websites which allow you to rent out your servers essentially as a VPS on a fairly long term way with a decent payout. However I tried sending them an email and got no response. Are there any other such services?
(The website was this )
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
The only reason why I’m considering this kind of monetisation is cause my original plan of flipping office computers into low end gaming machines is not working
Maybe don’t try to market them as gaming PCs and just market them as great workstation PCs. Also, it depends on the market and your inventory imports. If your market is people who can afford current Gen laptops, they will not like your PCs. If you market them as home theater media streaming PCs for those who want something better than a firestick, then it will make a better selling point. Either way, if you have a steady supply of these low-end PCs, then think about multiple markets instead of limiting your client base to just cheap gaming PCs. There is so much more a computer can be. Do some market research on your local or online markets and make the PCs capable of solving their needs.
I tried doing such market analysis and it did seem that the low end gaming market was filled with overpriced stuff that I could easily undercut with apparently even some semi professional sellers present.
Why do you need to have “scamming people” as a business model instead of selling those machines as what they are?
They’re born for office use and are still perfect for office use. They’re not and they’re never been gaming machines. You’re trying to deceive those people that they just know “Intel i7 is good”, but they don’t know that a 1st gen Intel i7 is worse than a 10th gen Intel i3. They’ll immediately return it as soon as they discover it can’t run even old games at 720p 30fps
Find which line you like (optiplex, thinkcentre, HP), stock only similar computers and sell them to small businesses, 5-6 years old machines are still overkill for accounting and email.
I resell old thinkcentres with a 100% margin without any kind of lie or omission and customers are happy and buy again. Then because I only stock the same stuff I have plenty of spare parts and I can give fast replacement
Im not scamming? I upgraded the machines, doubling the ram and adding a dedicated graphics card. I’m actually attempting to create value
I run one of these office machines as a desktop/server. My desktop is a vm with vfio and it works well.
Its especially nice as I can basically though in tons of ram and even a external GPU and power supply with an adapter. Don’t call someone a scammer just because they want to make money
You could sell the hardware. That’s about it unless you want to save money by self hosting
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
Build a home lab and learn skills that get you a well-paying job.
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.
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.
