no problem, you might want to talk to a few people here that have used external renderfarm particularly those that make animated shorts. I am sure you will find a few people that would love to make shorts that the probabley don’t have the resources to render themselves.
this is a great project, the risk of failing however seem quite big to me, i wouldn’t dare to try it myself, but you seem confident and prepared, i really wish you the best of luck.
My few cents about the costs and service:
giving the opportunity to try a service like that is essential, had i the need for a renderfarm, i would definetly want to try it before paying anything.
To keep the freeusers from taking over the system you could, as mentioned before, limit the numer of frames one individual can render, this could be easily exploited however(having multiple accounts, changing ips, etc. all that possibly automated).
Another approach, that can be mixed with the frame limit, would be to have a fixed amount of free slots(eg. 10% of system capacity), and the rest payed slots. free users would have to get in line to have their frames rendered, paying users would have direct access.
And just as i was thinking about all this i got another idea, a little more complicated but still interesting:
Have free users earn their free frames by contributing to the farm. You could combine a serverbased farm with a home computer cluster based one. People would have to install a client that they run to “donate” processing power, after they have contributed a certain amount, they receive a frame in return, that they can then render on the farm.
The question is, would people contribute? I would definitely do it. leave the computer running all night and receive a few frames to render the next day. That way you could have a relatively small renderfarm, with low cost, boosted, by a potentially huge cluster of home computers. Again paying users would have direct access to the combined capacity.
Whichever way you chose, i hope it works out.
Thank you Mr_Mangoo, I do nearly not dare it myself and I realize that I have a lot of fundraising to do in order to create a farm-service like this. As I have explained earlier in the thread I do not want to start off running a home-computer-based renderfarm, but a combination as you describe might be a valid option in time after having seen how this project progresses. I have opened a poll in an additional thread as I apparently could not edit my first post in this thread to be a poll, the poll-thread is to be found here: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=185164 and I hope I get good response
I want to thank you all for your advice and hope for a continuing fruitful debate which results in the best solution for the end-users after all, it is you the farm will serve:)