New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Exploring Interest in ARM-Based Server Hosting
allexanderbm
Member
in General
Hello everyone,
I wanted to gauge interest in a potential offering: ARM-based server hosting. This would include dedicated access to hardware such as Raspberry Pis, RK3399 single-board computers, and possibly even more powerful options like Ampere-based processors.
Would this be something you or your projects could benefit from? I’d love to hear your thoughts, use cases, or any interest in such a service.
Best regards,
Allexander B
Comments
If the price would be comparable to x86 then I don't think there would be a lot of demand.
But people would probably enjoy having dedicated servers whatever architect they were.
The issue with these sbcs is that you physically can't really scale them well enough to give you enough headroom to offer them for cheap. If the monthly price is 1/3rd of the sbc price then I'd much rather buy it and own it instead of renting.
We really wanted to do Ampere, but there's still a clear stigma around ARM vs. x86, and I doubt that ARM would sell as well or be as profitable as x86. Especially on LET, a lot of users are not running their own applications and/or may be unfamiliar with ARM, so they may not know if their application is even compatible. There's also a lot of competition already from the likes of Netcup, Hetzner Cloud, and Oracle who all offer extremely cheap ARM-based virtual machines already.
For SBC, PIs and SBCs in general are just way too expensive right now. This is something that we had also looked into, and it's a lot of work to reflash SD cards and provide KVM access whenever a customer wants to change their system. We had thought of making control boards and using some sort of network boot solution, but we ended up not doing this because the support alone would make it unsustainable.
$7/yr deals pls. Dedi only. Happy to pay for IP and bandwidth separately.
It will be just like a budget airline. Or wait. That’s how the biggies rob you
I'd quite frankly love an all-ARM world. I dream of ARM clusters. But outside of Apple it's an x86 world.
Windows made x86 big. Linux took advantage of commodity hardware Windows could also run on. People use Linux because it uses the same x86 hardware as Windows. And in turn, apps need x86.
Even on servers where Linux is strong, so is Windows. Dell and HPE aren't going to make separate lines if one SKU supports both OSes.
Yes, some Linux server apps have embraced ARM, but 90% of server apps and 95% of desktop apps didn't.
I only own a MacBook Pro because of Apple Silicon. If we still had Intel Macs I'd only use Linux. But I also own an ThinkPad because of Linux and Linux apps needing x86. In fact I can't run my business on ARM, even if I'd love to.
Even for my homelab, I'd love to have an all-ARM cluster but it's too expensive. Trump just made it worse.
x86 is sadly cheaper considering a ton of refurbished desktops, thin clients and low-cost Intel/AMD Mini PCs.
It's easier to get a high-end ARM machine than ever before, I'm looking at you Apple. But it's harder to get a low-end ARM machine than it was in the 2010s. I have a Dell Wyse as a Wi-Fi to Ethernet bridge because a Raspberry Pi would be more expensive.
I own a Mac because of Apple Silicon. But nobody makes a open high-end ARM64 networking board (anymore), you either need MikroTik or Ubiquiti, or you use x86. So I bought a MikroTik CCR2004 and dumped OPNsense.
Hello everyone,
Thank you all for the valuable feedback — I truly appreciate it! After considering everything, I’ve decided to move forward with the idea.
My goal is simple: to offer the most affordable dedicated Raspberry Pi 5 servers on the market. As of now, I’m aiming for a starting price of just €2.99/month per Pi 5.
Stay tuned — more details coming soon!
I'm wondering if ARM for hosted- applications, especially for e.g. Minecraft hosting would be a better idea. You can get really good single core perf on some of the modern Ampere CPUs...
if you could actually reach that, you'd definitely have a market. a 2GB pi 5 is €45 from mouser
Hope someone like this guy come with CloudFlare Tunnel like product for home server folks like me, who are stuck behind CG-NAT.
Although at present, the CF Tunnel is free but ToS only allows text based personal websites
Presently, VPS based VPN Tunnel with Port Forwarding is the only solution to expose self hosted stuff out to public internet. Even those dirt cheap single core VPS are somewhat under utilized along with the Static IPv4.
If a company puts a reverse proxy, one single dirt cheap vps can serve tens of home server folks with charge being paid for bandwidth only.
Although not sure how many home server folks are actually out there to make this work in scale.
Thanks.
What are you planning to do for recovery options/rescue system?
Hello,
You mean backup wise ?
Hello,
For rescue I would like to add backup boot images on a separate partition.
It could be interesting if you hook up (and expose to custs) a serial console, and have some form of rescue boot that doesn't require anything on local storage (no relying on specific bootloader config on local storage or a separate partition on local storage)
Hello,
That is an amazing idea — I’ll get to the execution !
No, what do I do if the OS I have installed doesn't boot any more or I messed up the network configuration - how do I recover from that?
Hello,
We will have a serial console as rescue solution, It’ll run on a separate server, you can access that if anything occurs. We are still working it out.
Is arm hosting possible? WordPress and alike only use PHP and Apache so difference should not be noticeable.