Hello everyone. I currently don’t have a job and am looking for a way to earn some money withing my abilities. My best bet at this day is hosting a server for data processing (eg: super computing). I heard about render farms for Blender in the past, although I never used or hosted one myself. Since I love Blender and enjoy doing things in its area, I was wondering if there are any services which pay people to host render farms over the internet.
I’m not sure if my understanding of how this works is correct, but this is the approach I thought about: I buy a server powerful enough to handle rendering at decent speeds. I then install a simple Linux distribution and Blender, and configure the addon for the server farm service. The addon can hopefully be linked to an username, in which I can add my Paypal or bank account. The system detects the amount of work my machine has done during that day / week / month, and sends the sum of money it sees fit. The system would be dedicated to this purpose, so Blender can use 100% resources and network.
My only wish would be for the service to be flexible, and not have constraints regarding uptime or the data stored. So if my server goes down for a longer amount of time, just have the service stop paying during that period, but without people pressuring me into maintaining it or being permanently off the job. I don’t aim to make a fortune out of this, and any amount is fine… although I would appreciate a service which pays at least 100$ a month. I’m willing to buy expensive hardware for this purpose.
Firstly, I’d like to know if such a service exists, and where I can register to host hardware for a Blender rendering farm. Second, I’d like to know what hardware you recommend for optimal Blender performance, given that I’d build the server with this purpose in mind.
Companies like Amazon offer services such as EC2 that can do this much more economically than you can, in professional datacenters with highspeed internet connections.
Services like render.st build their services on top of this infrastructure. The key is in that you provide a service, which means you need to develop the required software infrastructure. Services like EC2 take the risk off expensive hardware purchases that might go unused, but it doesn’t take the risk off investing in developing the platform.
Think about it: If you could just make a good ROI by just buying computer hardware and plugging it in anywhere, you’d see that happen everywhere.
Yea, as Zalamander said, services like amazons EC2 servers make it incredibly easy to build very powerful systems, that can scale up/down automatically and have fast access to cloud storage, scalable databases etc… They have very large GPU clusters that can be used (although its not cheap) and are relatively competitive with regards to prices.
In fact, a good in depth tutorial on how to setup your own render farm using Amazon Web Services would be great for the community. Since blender uses python for scripting, a python web framework like django or flask makes it pretty simple to get a basic renderfarm setup to utilise EC2 servers.
Back on topic. Plugging in some hardware and letting people use it is just not going to make you any money. If you are decent at web development, with a focus on back end development, you will be able to get yourself a nice little renderfarm running, which might make you some income. And I emphasize the ‘might’, as its a fairly saturated market, and people have been doing it for sometime. Your going to need something special to stand out from the crowd.
Further more, I can get you enough stories about people with ideas, and those who lost money without enough prior research, or skills to pull off the job. The internet is competitive, you can make a million or loose 10k. Money/time lost can always be capitalized in the learning curve, but you have to draw the line somewhere.
Thanks for the replies. I’m not familiar with the Amazon services and EC2, but might look into it later. In essence, I could rent processing power through Amazon but would need to develop my own API? And other than that, there are no render farms that let you directly contribute a server of your own from home?
Either way, I barely know some basic programming and scripting to this day, which is why I’m looking for something simple such as renting processing power to a service (like Blender rendering). Wouldn’t mind if it earned even as little as 1$ a day, with a powerful machine built for the purpose. I am surprised there aren’t a lot of services renting processing power at this time… although with professional server clusters it’s understandable they’d turn to that rather than random strangers with a PC over the internet.
There is such a service, its called crypto currency mining. When you mine you are renting your processing power out in the hopes of finding a coin that you can then trade for different coins or turn it into cash. There are many different types of crypto currency that require varying levels of hardware to turn a profit in. Do some research and decide what the best hardware, crypto mining pools, etc are right for you. You can also mine as much or as little as you want to ie you are not pressured by anyone but yourself to keep your machine up and running.