Suppose you won 1,000 gallons of gas but you had to use it in a year, would you figure out ways to burn it by driving extra, etc?
With the gas scenario, the external "costs" (pollution) are obvious but running a server isn't free (of external costs) either.
Just a thought.
You funded your project through a blog and social media campaign dedicated to awareness of fossil fuel pollution and sold ads only to solar companies and bike manufacturers.
In would later estimated that your 1000 gallon investment created enough good will and awareness to save an estimated 10000 gallons per year and launched you a new career as a pro green/solar consultant.
What then buddy?
Really you need to create a start-up which offers value to someone, the fact you have 1 year of hosting is nice but it should only be a small part of a larger business plan. Look for ideas [1][2] but most importantly, look at what you are good at.
Lastly, go as fast as you can. A year is a very short time.
[1] http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html [2] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+ideas&...
I'm not sure what you can learn with $10,000 worth of servers that you can't learn with $1,000 worth and an amazon AWS account. If it's just you, you won't need to scale up for a while and AWS is super cheap.
Convert it to as much cash as you can, then spend it more economically on a service with no time restrictions on the use of the resources.
I mean, do whatever you want, but as someone that's had to work with this industry for fifteen years, I recommend against starting a hosting business.
This way you can do good while learning something (new technologies, automating a possible whack-a-mole game with the censors, etc.)
(cough, cough, ... I could use one)
However, maybe you can combine your intention to learn and help out someone with a need for cloud computing by volunteering for their project. Many good projects, some open source, need this kind of computing access.
Your time is the most important investment. If you want to learn, decide what you want to learn. If the cloud credits can help with that (e.g. if you want to learn about large scale deployment, or practice tuning ML models), then great. If not, just ignore the credits and spend time as you would have without them.