Vultr is a popular Cloud Hosting Provider with 2M visitors per month and what makes them popular is how easy you can create and destroy VPS servers on a Pay-As-You-Go basis.
Spawning a server literally takes 20 seconds and about 3 minutes to complete. When you don't pay the bills, your server will be suspended and after a few days it will be re-assigned to someone else. That's why sometimes when you spawn a new server you suddenly get traffic while on your new website while you didn do anything about website promotion or bought any traffic.
That is because the previous owner of your server didn't update his domain yet to point to a different IP.
How To Exploit Vultr To Get Free Traffic?
Now what if you could automate the process of spawning servers and find out if it is getting traffic? Luckily, this can be very easy accomplished by using Vultr "Start Up scripts". Basically you put instructions what the server has to execute after it has been installed. We're gonna put an instruction to redirect all traffic to a specific page, int his case your URL where you can monetize the traffic.
#!/bin/sh
# replace the default index.php with your redirect script
echo "server { listen 80 default_server; server_name _; rewrite ^ http://yourid.voluumtrk.com/9b1ffe34-3ee4-4a80-ac0d-d912208f5f33?server=\$server_addr;}" > http.conf
# restart the server
sudo service nginx restart
What's important is that you make you also redirect requests to non-existing pages, and that can be achieved with some minor NGINX config rules as you see above.
Spawn 10 Servers At Once
Now comes the FUN part....Vultr allows you to spawn up to 10 servers at a time, yes 10 servers, imagine how fast you can spawn new servers and "mine" for traffic, all for just $5 per server per month.
Completely Auto-Pilot
You could even completely automate this using the Vultr API and for example the Voluum API.
- You create servers using the Vultr API and you will read which servers have traffic using the Voluum API.
- If a server doesn't get traffic within a given time then you destroy the server using the Vultr API.
What Do You Need To Get Started
About the Author
Pathaksa Tongpitak
