I have been renting a Windows 2008-based Virtual Server from 1&1 for the past few years. It is located in a well-connected server farm, has 10 gigs of space, and unlimited Traffic. I used to host my Subversion repos on it, but have started doing this locally; therefore, I have no use for the server any more.
However, the contract runs until January 2011.
What is a productive (and legal, and useful) use the server could be put to until the lease expires? I was thinking of something like the SETI@Home project, but I'm not aware of anything similar in the web field. The server's not that big in processing power, but as said has good connectivity.
Any ideas?
Look into tor (The Onion Router). If you have a fair amount of bandwidth, and specially if you have unlimited traffic, your server could be a valuable addtition to the tor network. Have a look for yourself and see if it sounds useful: http://www.torproject.org/
Don't know what you do with your computers. For some people, it could store some files for access on the web, maybe host a programming project, put up a web page for a local event.
Otherwise, folding at home, SETI at home, anything hosted by BOINC (see this article for example).
Just make sure to check on it once in awhile and keep it updated. The charity goes to waste if it malfunctions or gets hacked from neglect.
Don't forget Folding at home :)
You could run a long running torrent server for free software projects like ubuntu, centos, etc etc, basically allowing quite a few people to benefit from this bandwidth. Should also be completely legal. Maintenance would also be very low.
If you wanted to be more involved you could do full mirroring / hosting.
The first thing that popped into my mind was file serving for Open Source projects, many of which are struggling to establish mirrors.