Ask HN: I just sold the company… now what?

Background, I started a B2B data backup company at the end of 2005/early 2006 worked on it for several years before realizing that I was missing something in my personal development that was limiting my success.

I love solving hard problems, building products, love hardware and building/maintaining bare metal servers. I did not like the sales/biz dev side of things. In an effort to continue my professional development, I decided to move to NYC and get a masters degree. Before the move I turned over the management of the business to others. While in NYC I was fortunate to work at two of the hottest startups in town, I learned a lot about myself and scaling businesses.

Fast forward six years, the business continued to grow even in the face of stiff competition and plunging prices for cloud storage/online backup. A month ago the business sold to a larger competitor.

Over the years we moved data centers (twice!) and completely rebuilt our infrastructure three times. We made mistakes and a few good decisions. The best decision we made was in our last data center move.

HN, here is where I need some help: I'm left with a few things… lots of hardware, storage, bandwidth, and rack space.

At this point I'm trying to figure out what do with all of this stuff. I don't want to shell out the cash for the data center space each month if I don't have a use for it, however I will never get a deal like this again and don't want to give it up… I really love not being a slave to Amazon/Linode and hosting with my own servers.

If someone has any ideas I'd love to hear em… or if you have servers that would be too expensive to host elsewhere because of bandwidth costs, I'd be happy to host them for you without any bandwidth fees. Just cover the costs of power. I've got a gigabit right now that is billed at a flat rate so bandwidth hogs and services like that are ideal.