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Raspberry Pi Hosting Scene
Curious at this point, maybe this goes in another category, not sure. Raspberry Pi hosting, I've seen it pop up, but is it truly a thing yet? As a DC, considering offering, but curious if there is a true demand yet for it, or if it's just hype. Personally, I've always felt myself, why, just buy a VPS. But I mean if people want it haha.
As a provider I've only truly found one rack mount (correct me if there are others I'm missing), the BitScope BR40, racks up 40 Pi's, power, controllable, etc. Problem is, I hate the form factor! From the perspective of wasted space, it uses 7U's of vertical space, but only 12" deep into rack!! That's 16" of wasted space behind it in the rack! Unless mounted on shelf flat. I guess you could always mount both sides of rack front and back, that's doable, then only 4" of wasted space between. But we're also talking at 40 per mount, that's a 48 port switch each, so 2 more U's gone. So total of 9U's for 80 Pi's mounted.
Just curious the demand in the market for this, if it's worth my time or not. That being said, getting my hands on 80 Pi's right now, in this market, next to impossible with the price point, so probably moot right now haha.
Comments
Only seen 2 or 3 providers offer it, and Hetzner as some M1 macs for the arm side.
This will be super cool though.
https://youtube.com/shorts/bBdq2hf5R0I
There are providers who offer dedicated Raspberry Pi, like DataIdeas [ @DataIdeas-Josh ]. There are also providers who offer Raspberry Pi collocation. One could also put multiple such single board computers into 1U chassis for collocation. Imagination is the limit.
However, I've seen much better implementations on ARM like Online Labs with C1 baremetal servers (which in my opinion were a success). Raspberry Pi is not great for hosting in DC due to it's microSD card and form factor wasted. If one wants to do business with Pi, a better solution is multiple Raspberry Pi Compute Modules attached to some board inside a single 1U chassis with cooling. Depending on what datacenter wants, there are solutions. At the end, the consumer will only want a single Pi as dedicated baremetal server (so this is the selling point); but if one goes down this path, there might be better and cheaper single board computers on the Chinese market, as Raspberry Pi is more popular due to it's brand nowadays.
i can't understand why the community here would be so hot for dedicated rpi hosting. only recently the hardware prices have come down, and price to performance still remain meh.
if you want a couple of them (and also expect an insanely good deal), you cannot do better than the cheapest ipv4 plans we get here. maybe with exception of how much (much slower) ram you get for the same money. for experimenting, why not just run it at home and find a way to connect to it from the internet?
if you want a cluster, it is very niche as it is and not sure how reliable it is to host 24/7 operations on it.
if you want to play with arm solutions, we already got server-grade arm vps on rent, even free ones from oracle.
feel free to enlighten me about use cases worth serving by running a business.
40 are used for CI/CD at jetbrains, rp4 compute module cluster
It's the novelty of running RPi basically. At the end of the day, the most optimal use of resources and hardware is going to be a VPS. But some people believe a Raspberry Pi is the best use for dedicated hardware at the cheapest level (cheaper than an Intel Atom).
I'd put actual Raspberry Pi hosting dependent on individual usecase and has a more niche-appeal. For most, a VPS is perfectly fine.
I think you're giving people who host on Raspberry Pi more credit than it's really due. Not saying hosting on a RPi is bad, just that it's not a very common usecase.
It's not a bad option if your demands aren't CPU-heavy. I run stuff on a Pi that costs about the same as a similar-memoried VPS (from a decent provider), and I don't need to worry about noisy neighbours. Performance isn't awesome, but it's also predictable.
I mean it's not good if all you want is an impressive YABS but it's fine for basic hosting if you just want a quiet life and can't justify a grown-up dedi.
@default Thank you for the shoutout.
@jfreak53 We offer RPi's as a dedicated and also can do colocation over at https://RPiServers.com
As far as the BitScope box. They are crazy expensive when we had asked about them. Some of our biggest issues with these small boards has been the reflashing of the SD card. Granted there are RPi providers out there like Mythic Beasts over in the UK that has figured out how to work the RPi without a SD card. (Its network booting yes but they got some custom software as well.)
On @kait mention of the blades. We are working with Uptime Labs on getting a few of the blades when they officially come out.
The biggest question on if its worth it??? At current prices for IPs, hardware. I would say not really. However if you have a couple of RPi's laying around and some IPs to spare. Throw it out there. See how the demand is for that service on your network!
yeah i tried to the address the novelty part in my "play with arm solutions" bit. most people here don't have anything to do with the tinker-friendly aspects of the sbc. like you are not accessing gpio headers while it is in a datacenter.
Yeah. What I've seen is people usually value the novelty of "dedicated" a lot more. It's like living in an apartment vs a shed. A Raspberry Pi is basically a "homeowner" but you basically own a shed. It's dedicated. It's nice. It's cozy. But it's definitely light on resources.
You can get a huge apartment for the same price. But some people like being by themselves.
The tinker-ness that Raspberry Pi really advertises is definitely lost here (imho).
Hence why I would advocate for IPv4 to be marked as deprecated.
Also don't blame me if you lose money on the blades
Just watched this. It looks really cool, but I still can't help but think it's a bit of a waste of RPi's given that they're as rare as rocking horse shit.