Provider based on Raspberry Pi?

cerberos

The specs of a Raspberry Pi is not dissimilar to what you get from many VPS providers, I'm sure it's only a matter of time before someone tries to be a provider using them.

What would the pros and cons? Some thoughts...

• they're cheap, but are they cheap enough to be viable?
• no HDD, but I imagine a 16gb SD card would be plenty (all things considered)
• low power (3 watts), low enough to be economical (adream.homeunix.com/)
• I assume SD cards have much better IO than spinning drives so I'm guessing a 1gb swap file might not be that bad
• no moving parts, does that mean they don't need cooling
• currently they can't be mounted very easily as they don't have any purpose designed holes
• I'm guessing there are advantages from a provider's point of view to having many virtual servers on a single box, eg configuration and allocating to customers etc, but then SD cards are easy to clone

Discuss.

Taylor

Edis colo them and offer to buy them after the free lease so I guess they could be doing something like it offering them.

Taz

Are you Serious Bro!

William

@cerberos said: I assume SD cards have much better IO than spinning drives so I'm guessing a 1gb swap file might not be that bad

God no, 5MB/s.

AsadHaider

Are you trolling?

Wolf95

XD, It's just not worth it, The amount of hardware needed to get it running so it could run with low maintenance is high.

netomx

@cerberos said: no moving parts, does that mean they don't need cooling

this has to be kidding

MrAndroid

@William said: God no, 5MB/s.

You can get SD cards with 20MB/s write speeds! I have one in the post for my Pi, and after I get my case I may send it to you guys.

Infinity

@netomx said: this has to be kidding

+1 A CPU doesn't have moving parts, yet it gets hot.. Same applies with pretty much any silicone chip and non-moving component.

jcaleb

since pi are dedicated, you can abuse the cpu and disk if you want, without fear of affecting any neighbor.

eastonch

Abuse a 300Mhz(?) CPU with 256MB of ram? @Jcaleb :']

It would super crazy to see this actually happening. -- A rack filled with a thousand RPI's with IPV6... -- It's just crazy enough to work, they would also have enough power to host atleast a tiny webserver / site and somewhat a VPN.

As for disk space, you could always purchase a USB pen drive? -- Not ideal but it could be faster than the SD card (C10 - 10MB/s :S!).

Still, feasible idea, just no demand.

jcaleb

but you can use the 300MHZ maxed 24/7. maybe chess computation or something =)

ElliotJ

@cerberos

We had a discussion about this a month or so back, it's a nice idea, but there's a number of shortfalls.

• Unlike conventional servers, they do not have hardware remote access, No IMPI, HKVM, etc, for rebooting.
• They do not have power management; they're either on or unplugged.
• SD cards tend to fail if you hammer them too hard, so you'd have to replace them frequently, which is an expense.

There were a few suggested workarounds, like, having a controllable USB hub to power up/down the Pi's, and using either USB Hard Drives or some sort of iSCSI setup for storage, however they're simply not economically viable when comparing them to VPSs unless you have a huge setup. I'm sure @Damian might be able to chime in on this.

As a novelty, I'm sure a few people would like to have these, but they're simply not suited for anything serious.

That being said, if you ship a RPi to Edis, they'll colo it for free!

Damian

@cerberos said: Discuss.

Complete. http://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/2403/raspberry-pi-dedicated-server

I had the idea of using an APC, from http://apc.io , but due to their arbitrary $37 shipping for their $49 product, I decided to skip it too.