What if you <i>didn't</i> use it at all?<p>Suppose you won 1,000 gallons of gas but you had to use it in a year, would you figure out ways to burn it by driving extra, etc?<p>With the gas scenario, the external "costs" (pollution) are obvious but running a server isn't free (of external costs) either.<p>Just a thought.
This is almost a dupe from last year:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9546609" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9546609</a><p>Really you need to create a start-up which offers value to someone, the fact you have 1 year of hosting is nice but it should only be a small part of a larger business plan. Look for ideas [1][2] but most importantly, look at what you are good at.<p>Lastly, go as fast as you can. A year is a very short time.<p>[1] <a href="http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html" rel="nofollow">http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html</a>
[2] <a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+ideas&t=ffcm&ia=web" rel="nofollow">https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+ideas&...</a>
The problem as I see it is you have a year to create a something that will generate $10K in revenue annually or you will go quickly into the red and have to shut it down.<p>I'm not sure what you can learn with $10,000 worth of servers that you can't learn with $1,000 worth and an amazon AWS account. If it's just you, you won't need to scale up for a while and AWS is super cheap.<p>Convert it to as much cash as you can, then spend it more economically on a service with no time restrictions on the use of the resources.
I have free server credits of $10000 which should be utilised with in a year from a famous hosting provider. I can run machines with 64GB RAM and with multiple cores for that prize. How can I utilise it in the best way? I am a programmer myself. I am looking for suggestions and also collaborations.
Create a public VPN service for unfortunate people behind state-run firewalls. Maybe only serve educational and news sites if you are worried about abuse.<p>This way you can do good while learning something (new technologies, automating a possible whack-a-mole game with the censors, etc.)
Offer free minecraft servers for coding teachers running this course: <a href="https://github.com/teachthenet/TeachCraft-Challenges" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/teachthenet/TeachCraft-Challenges</a><p>(cough, cough, ... I could use one)