OSDev.org

Hi, I have like a ton of wasted space and bandwidth with my hosting account.. anyone have any ideas as to how I can contribute to people or make money with like 30G of space and 800G of bandwidth(very fast speeds too) (saving me 20G/200G)

I thought about being a application hoster, but I lack root privileges so I can't chroot anything, so it'd be quite insecure.(also, I have access to all ports, I have ssh, and I have a dedicated IP)

I can't host websites due to insecurities with PHP and me extremely hating safe_mode.

I can host SVN and FTP.. but I don't know anyone that really needs just that(especially enough to pay for it)

Anyone have any ideas?

You could host multiplayer game servers.

Host a sort of 'digital library,' where one can go to download free books and technical papers and whatnot. I'm sure there are plenty of authors out there that would love to let people download their works for free, if only to get their name out there. It doesn't have to be limited to technical books, either. Works of fiction, biographies, and so on would be nice too. There are two things I think are important (the first being common sense and the second my personal opinion): Categorize the books in some way (because it's digital, a hierarchical way would be great) and give the users the ability to rate books.

Of course, if it becomes popular, you might run out of space @ 30G...

my host is flexible enough to expand affordable.. and if my thing was that busy, I'm sure I could put up ads or have premium services or something like that to get money to pay for the extra hosting requirements.. don't they have quite a few services out there though like this?

I like the game idea, myself

I should develop one and have you host it...

well, like I said, lack of chroot means your game code would have to be opensource and I would have to look through it very thoroughly to make sure it doesn't try to compromise my server, and check for vulnerabilities...

Now, if my EPBP project was mature enough this would be ok cause I could monitor just about everything without root access... but.. it doesn't even have an assembler so that won't work lol

I'm developing a multiplayer game similar to Battlefield, but with major TWISTS (simple graphics, but utilises an awesome physics engine, but I"m not saying how because it's a secret until it's released ).

It might not be 6 months to a year until I finish the game in my free time (I'm doing it in my free time much like my OS).

I have most of the gameplay planned out, and I'm halfway through writing the game engine (uses a fully programmable pipeline, self-scalable across all cores/cpus, portable across platforms (well, any platform that supports OpenGL or Direct3D)).

When it's done I'd encourage people to host their own servers over the Internet or a local network, but I'm thinking maybe a few always-on "official" servers will help encourage people to get into the game who don't have a huge team of friends to play with. But I won't worry about that until it's done.

Well I thought a bit about the book/paper/article thing..

That'd be nice for like a few months experiment to see how it does.. if it doesn't work scrap it and find another idea. My problem is I really don't have time to write a ton of software for it... what software could I use for the website so I can set it up and thats about it?

Also, what features does it very strongly need to be good?

The only two features I can think of are a good organization and the ability for a user to rate a book/article/whatever. It really shouldn't be too hard to write some custom software, and I'd do it if I weren't swamped with several other projects. I tend to bite off more than I can chew...

Run linux dedicated servers for Steam games. The server software is pretty secure from attack and lots of people want them.

I agree with JamesM.

I hosted a CS:S server once on Linux and I don't remember having to do any sudo work. It was really secure (with patches) and ran really fast. Also, I wouldn't mind playing on a private server again...

Well, I just kinda discovered that my host doesn't really set a limit on cpu and ram usage.. but if it's constant cpu time, they will frown on it.. lol so a server-side physics engine probably isn't good

you make it sound like the server will be rendering everything... which it doesnt.

I was using a P4 for serving a 16-man game and it barely got about 15%, and it was running a GUI.

oh.. ok then.. maybe I'll try it...

I would build a hosting server/game server