Be a VPS for other people?
I have friends and relatives that would like to do some memory and compute intensive tasks, but lack the hardware locally. I have loads of ram doing nothing and a little compute to spare. Is there a way for me to set up some service accessible to them that would allow them to spin up VMs, similar to Linode or DigitalOcean? I know letting outside access to a proxmox server would be disastrous. I guess I could setup a VPN server into a virtualized proxmox server? Would rather find a way to point them to a url with a username and password and have them able to use my server as their vps like AWS or Linode.
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The moment you start charging for access to your hardware you have to start signing SLAs, have documented backups available, have a support team on hand, it's just a nightmare. Would not recommend.
OP might not be looking to make a full paid service considering he's just doing this for friends and relatives.
I get the sentiment though. I run a Jellyfin server that I share with a few friends and some of them have flat out told me that I should start charging for it. I refused because getting paid for it just sets up an expectation that it will be reliable and have all the stuff that they want. Personally, I don't want that kind of pressure. I want to be able to tweak the server and install new things / updates without worrying about uptime.
I tell my friends that my SLA for my media server is Shit's Likely Available just so they understand that I give it out of generosity and don't want anything in return. The bonus is that keeping brutally honest upfront likely means less risk of me ruining someone's Friday movie night.
Was not looking to make a paid service, was just trying to help my dad out and my friend learn without them paying a VPS company.
i understand they don't want to pay, but would $12.00 for a full year be cheap enough to consider? ovh has a new customer deal going for 2gb ram/20gb storage vps. $0.97 a month for the first year, and you can add up to ten of those to a single new account.