I have a 4 unit high "horsepower" render farm which is idle to often. I was just wondering how or if people rent out their spare resources???
So I take it this is something that doesn't happen?
Well problem is that those of us that need a farm, either have one, or need so large scale rendering effort that they need a serious contender.
Anwyay you may find that the overhead of supplying time for 4 or so machines pretty much outweighs any gain as you must provide users with tools to fix their render get them and so on. Evan so your prices must be totaly minimal for any of this to be useful. Last time i used a external farm i used one that had a 100 cpus to spare.
How ever i don't see theres no market for very small time entry level users. But you will need to be able to offer a full web interface and guarantee some form of privacy, tech support and stuff. Problem is that you'd probably spend setting this up more than gaining form the exercise.
You could do it overa a terminal like ssh quite safely, only not all users know how to use command lines and debug thatway.
Compare yourself to the already established render services.