Hello folks,
I have a mini PC which I use to host my website and some lightweight services. The mini PC idles at ~10% cpu usage. I was wondering if I can contribute 90% of CPU to the community. Thinking that maybe I can host other people’s websites for free.
How can I do that? Should I host some fediverse software? What do I do with this much processing power?
Thanks in advance!
Good intentions, but I would be wary of anything not official like foldingathome or boinc (both great projects I recommend)
The reason is other people are horrible, and while your intentions are good, it’s significant risk. Lemmy had a csam attack a while ago and I immediately moved my instance to the cloud because I learned that if I even accidentally hosted anything it means immediate seizure, self hosting it means they plow through my door and yank the servers.
Tor nodes, peertube, you open yourself up to that risk
BOINC is great. In its day, you could get an enormous amount of computing power on a shoestring budget thanks to volunteers. It also helped the volunteers feel like they were more a part of something, because they were! I used to have a small server farm crunching numbers for science.
Unfortunately, the landscape has changed. Some projects are still around, but many of the big players have left. Computing power is a lot more accessible now, and the main limitation is time spent analyzing the data rather than the computation itself. Cloud computing can make just about any computation happen fast for a reasonable price without having to own all of that hardware. GPUs have exploded in computation capacity. Just, a lot of factors came together where the need isn’t as great.
With that said, I still run it on one mini PC, but the payoff for having to write your application in a distributed fashion doesn’t have the return on investment that it used to.
Where are you hosting your instance now? I’ve been looking into a cheap VPS for the things I’d rather not host on my personal home network.
I landed on digital ocean. Fair prices for a vpc and a reliable name
K&T Host does Lemmy and it works great. Their support is stellar.
“my instance to the cloud because I learned that if I even accidentally hosted anything it means immediate seizure,”
That sounds a bit extreme. You are not hosting csam on purpose. And most likely try to moderate as good as possible.
I actually believe more people should host their own server. And get rid of the cloud. Not moving more to the cloud.
Look up what “strict liability” means in a criminal law context.
Well, I’m willing to take the risk then. I host all my fediverse services at home.
Yikes. Good luck to you, noble goals, but there are real consequences for even unknowingly hosting that content.
Tja.
It doesn’t matter if you’re intentionally hosting it.