Serious question! Climate change is ongoing and i‘m asking myself, if idling is just bad for our environment. Yeah, machines are already running if you idling just vps servers, but what about dedis?
What do you think? Or are some of you thinking, that climate change isn‘t a real thing, like trump? Just wondering what you guys are thinking…
Keep this in mind: We only want spare computing time from PCs that are switched on anyway. Keep it green!
http://www.distributed.net/
https://www.charityengine.com/
My proudest idle of $264.33 USD at Clouvider.
You are paying over 200 Dollars for nothing? Why? Are you rich? 
Sometimes I get started on a project and then nothing happens. If something idles I just go ahead and count OGR’s at distributed.net. There was a topic on LET a year or two ago.
Edit: obviously only happened for a month, recovered from the incident already
for a VPS no, a small Lowendbox, wont add a significant enough bad impact to the climate, so far my opinion.
Dedis mostly put them into idle and consume far less energy, still they consume a lot more than a single vps so I would say yes, even if they idle.
But like 30-50 Watts on idle wont have that much of an impact, but if you add all these machines that idle in datacenters it could be a significant impact.
So if you have a longterm idle machine e.g you got it for a cheap price and you dont need it.
May power it down for the weeks you wont need it? Would be a start.
But most of the people wont do that, since yea, you pay a flat pricing, you do not directly care, since it wont cost you money. So I would consider them impact of doing it not big enough, more people would need to do it but a good start.
Hi I just found this forum.
I think it depends on where the server gets it electricity. I try and find data centers that run as much solar wind or hydro power as they can but its not always easy to find that out.
Yes I think climate change is real and we need to look after our planet and fast.
If this was posted on LET it would get trashed so I’m curious to see how it goes here 
Idling already-used resources is actually somewhat beneficial, as it lowers both power consumption and heat creation. It’s those bastards who are rendering porn on them that are the problem.
Global warming exists because we won’t stop making more humans. If you culled the herd, it’d be a lot less of an issue.
if you got some time…
Certainly running a distributed.net client and burning nonstop cpu uses more power than idling, so generates more emissions etc. One likes to imagine it’s doing something useful so maybe ok. The other version of that is bitcoin mining which just plain cashes in on wasting energy.
Thats the worst thing you could do, with a idle vps, not accelerate that shit fast enough.
Stop caring about minuscule levels of electricity used and live your life. Also, stop paying for servers you’re not using…
Yes, but saving the money now, well nah, next crash is on the horizion anyway.
But yea, do not waste it, like on fucking cheap idle servers you never gonna use but you still spend that 15$/y.
THAT ALL ADD’S UP, you know.
Tell me about it. Just got hit with a decent NAT VPS bill (not because of the cost, but the sheer number of them). Considering not renewing since the purpose I had for them has stalled for the time being.
Well, I dropped all the NAT OVZ, I used them as monitor remote but turned out, they are not reliable for that so. OVZ is a reason enough to drop it.
Why waste money right now on servers when you could be spending it on drugs, booze, hookers, and stockpiling precious metals?
A vps on a well-balanced Shared cpu hypervisor : no.
Impulse purchases of pre-2011 cpu dedis : yes, quite likely.
I like to stick to 2012 and newer.
$15 Dual L5420!!!
ideling a VPS on a non-overselling provider will save power after all as someone else can’t use the resources allocated to us 
Ideling a Dedi is, as many said, much worse as an old Xeon uses way too much electricity. But consider this, if you replace a old Xeon Server and it gets tossed out it will most likely not be replaced by a single new one, rather by four new ones + you save resources by using old gear 
Another aspect is if you idle a server it will most likely not use that much bandwidth which means there is less capacity needed in “the internet” which saves electricity.
And ofc, if your DC gets renewable energy it somewhat reduces the impact of ideling on the environment. 
Maybe its time to start compensating the CO2 footprint of our servers like we already can do with flying?
In Western Europe at least there’s quite a few “green” data-centers, i.e. data-centers running solely on renewable energy. So if it does worry you, just grab a server from any of these providers.