Best uses of a VPS for charitable computing/networking?

December 24, 2009 5:20 PM

In the spirit of the season: Mefites, what are your favorite charitable computing / charitable networking projects?

I have a Linode 360 (running Debian stable) that I barely use but can't let go of. I've been crunching work for the World Community Grid and am currently running a Freenet node, though I wish the latter was more polished. I've run a Tor node in the past, but the bandwidth controls never worked for me and I ran over quota.

I have about 200 GB of network transfer and my host appears to be pretty quiet except for my processes, so lets pretend that I have the whole 4 proc Xeon to myself.

Or should I finish migrating off of it and donate the 239.40 USD/yr to a good cause?

I'm looking to maximise "good" with an eye to under-resourced needs.

posted by khedron to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Best answer: Well, you get way better price per cycle the bigger you go, so it'd be better to have your target charitable computing project buy up CPU in bulk. Also, I got a 15 percent Linode discount for paying 2 years up front. So perhaps a donation would be a more effective way of getting things done. On the other hand it's rare for people to actually donate money, so you might not find a grid computing project taking donations.

Perhaps donate to support some other cause, or donate to support open grid computing software.
posted by pwnguin at 8:24 PM on December 24, 2009

Response by poster: Re: better price per cycle w/ scale, that does bring up an interesting idea for a project: resourced sysadmins banding together to best utilize the best of tech for charitable computing & networking goals.

The Tor Project does take donations and I generally prefer them to freenet.

Thanks for your thoughts.
posted by khedron at 10:18 PM on December 25, 2009