[HN Gopher] Raspberry Pi Colocation
___________________________________________________________________
Raspberry Pi Colocation
Author : 3xa
Score : 157 points
Date : 2021-11-06 14:29 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pi-colocation.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (pi-colocation.com)
| ruined wrote:
| ok but does anyone offer pi VMs that can boot my sdcard image
| ushakov wrote:
| there is a similiar, anonymous option from The Pirate Bay founder
|
| https://prq.se/?p=rpi
| solarkraft wrote:
| I'm gonna ask the dumb/obvious question: Why would I want this?
|
| It's certainly not for the compute. Isn't the point of a
| Raspberry Pi controlling periphery on the edge? But that's not
| possible here?
|
| ???
|
| It's not even needing ARM cores, as those are now cheaply offered
| by all the cloud computing companies.
|
| Is it just for some cheap fun? But if I'm going to host something
| on cheap amateur grade hardware, why would I not also just use my
| home connection? Is this for _the experience_ and education?
|
| ... I really don 't see what it's good for (explanations
| welcome).
| [deleted]
| wpietri wrote:
| For many years I was part of a bandwidth cooperative. We had a
| cabinet and a fat pipe and a bunch of sysadmins who wanted a
| place to keep their stuff. Early on it was all 1U or 2U
| systems. But later there was enough demand for Mac Minis that
| we dedicated a shelf to them.
|
| It didn't make much sense from a professional syadmin's
| perspective. But for a Mac user who already had their little
| project on a Mini and wanted to get it off their home
| bandwidth, it made sense to them in that it was one simple,
| incremental change. I imagine the market here is similar.
| xg15 wrote:
| But at least in your case, people could put their own
| machines in there. You wouldn't have rented out mac minis as
| dedicated servers, would you?
|
| Edit: Ah, misread the article. Alright, then what you did was
| indeed pretty similar.
| wpietri wrote:
| Yeah, ours was still a bit different, in that we just
| provided a shelf where you could plug your gear in. But it
| seems like the same principle.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Next to the other arguments, the colocation is pretty cheap. In
| Germany, you can calculate ~20ct per Wattmonth for electricity,
| so ~1EUR of this would go to electricity alone. Hosting at home
| also tends to come without static IP and non-symmetrical,
| somewhat unstable connections (speaking from painful
| experience).
|
| For this service you pay ~6EUR per month (assuming 50EUR for
| the Pi and two years of runtime, no SSD) for a rather powerful
| VM. Just as a comparison, at Linode, you get 1 shared CPU and
| 1G of RAM for roughly the same price, compared to 4 core and
| 4-8 gigs with the Pi. Storage is even more expensive, so if you
| attach a large SSD, the calculation becomes even better (but
| the 10Mbit might become a bottleneck quickly).
|
| [0] https://www.linode.com/products/shared/
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Scaleway's stardust is a lot cheaper though, and faster in
| terms of connectivity. But they are limited to 2 per customer
| ciex wrote:
| You can attach a big ass SSD to this and still pay just $6 a
| month. This is unique I think.
|
| I wonder how they would feel if you add your custom electronics
| to the Pi's GPIO connector.
| walrus01 wrote:
| I don't see how much use you would get out of a 2TB or 4TB
| SATA SSD attached to a raspberry pi if the network is locked
| at 10Mbps throughput.
| tyingq wrote:
| ~10.5 days per TB over 10Mbps :)
| walrus01 wrote:
| for the very patient rclone users
| entropie wrote:
| Depending on use that might be enough. I synced 1.4tb
| over multiple days with like 30mbit/s. Who cares?
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| An RPI4 w/ SSD for $6 is probably the best compute for the
| buck right now in colo prices. This basically looks like a
| BYO hardware setup where they can maximize economics due to
| the RPI form factor being consistent.
|
| I'd like to see the same thing but with a Mac mini.
| ghostly_s wrote:
| There have been Mac Mini colos for ages.
| glenneroo wrote:
| Anything benefiting from a static IP address, such as running
| your own VPN, mail server, Bitcoin node, TOR node... the latter
| of which got me banned by my bank's security team because I was
| marked as "suspicious traffic" (wasn't even an exit node) -
| preventing me from using online banking. Talking to support
| proved fruitless, however the ban was lifted as soon as I
| changed my IP address.
| SahAssar wrote:
| They don't give you a dedicated public IP, and only 10Mbit
| bandwidth.
| hellojesus wrote:
| I fix this by running a script on a cron job that updates dns
| records based on my current ip, using cloudfront to only
| allow known ips through my ufw rules. It doesn't work for
| 100% uptime, but I've never had an instance where visiting my
| domain failed.
|
| It may not work if you're running a tor node, depending on
| how cloudfront deals with them, but it does work for mostly-
| reliable dns resolution on a non-static, residential isp
| connection.
|
| Not negating the project, just offering an alternative for
| people that want a static ip without renting vps/metal and
| without the isp static upcharge.
| mike_d wrote:
| > alternative for people that want a static ip without
| renting vps/metal
|
| How do you think Cloudfront works? Amazon is just selling
| you a bunch of VMs pre-configured as load balancers.
|
| Not trying to be a jerk here, but the cloud has really
| caused otherwise smart people to lose a grasp on reality.
| xg15 wrote:
| Note that the IP address is shared with other PIs and there
| are restrictions on which ports you can use:
| https://examesh.de/en/docs/colocation/accessing-the-pi/
| tyingq wrote:
| I wonder why they wouldn't include direct ipv6 connectivity
| in addition to that proxy thing.
| YPPH wrote:
| That's a really big caveat - thanks for flagging it.
|
| Looks like web hosting or a mail server is completely out
| of the question.
| ghostly_s wrote:
| Why a Pi though? You're obviously not making use of any of
| that expensive IO other than the eth...why not just offer a
| "Pi-compatible " custom board* that's actually designed in a
| sensible way for this use-case? Would be substantially
| cheaper and more energy efficient.
|
| *Or really just shared hosting w/ containers running Raspbian
| on standard server hardware with a nice onboarding workflow
| for migrating from a real Pi would likely be sufficient for
| most people's use-cases--if you're not using peripherals I
| imagine you don't have any need for the real time OS
| features?
| vmception wrote:
| That's such a polite way of saying this is the dumbest thing
| you've ever seen
|
| Because that was my first reaction and thought it was a joke,
| like real, but done out of jest
|
| Similar to how an engineer put a string concatenation function
| on a networked compute instance, NPM and released it on docker
| my123 wrote:
| Small unit of dedicated hardware, without any other tenants on
| that same host.
| contravariant wrote:
| I mean sure, but if you've already bough a raspberry pi then
| you're most of the way there surely?
| tata71 wrote:
| Hugely underrated comment.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Security perhaps. VPS is no longer as secure with the rowhammer
| and cache exploitation vulnerabilities. And if you only need a
| tiny system, a raspberry pi is pretty ideal
| mysterydip wrote:
| "12 pis in 1U" where 1U is defined as the height of a pi on its
| side plus shelf, rather than the definition of 1U in every other
| 19" rackmount data center
| aae42 wrote:
| it seemed like they didn't quite understand the concept of rack
| units to me either
| zamadatix wrote:
| From their rack diagram it looks to really be 2.67U + 1U 24
| port switch per 12.
| jiripospisil wrote:
| While I completely understand the allure of running on your own
| hardware, if you just want a cheap server to host a personal page
| or similar, you cannot beat Scaleway's Stardust VM instances. For
| less than 2 EUR a month you get 1 vCPU, 1 GB of RAM, 1 IPv4+IPv6
| address, 10GB of storage and unlimited traffic. They claim up-to
| 100Mbps bandwidth but I regularly get much more than that. This
| sounds like a commercial but I'm just really happy with the
| service.
|
| https://gist.github.com/jiripospisil/b044b409d25dcf37d6e2c94...
| xg15 wrote:
| I think local hardware makes sense for LAN-only sites - e.g. a
| company wiki, a media center or a file storage with web
| interface.
|
| For anything that is supposed to be visible on the internet,
| I'd always use a hosted server - if nothing else, because I
| really don't want to open an ingress into my personal home
| network, even if my ISP permitted that.
|
| For use-cases were you _have_ to handle certain incoming
| requests even though your setup is mostly LAN-only otherwise
| (webhooks, ACME, adding some dashboard you can access from your
| phone...), services like PageKite[1] sound promising.
|
| [1] http://pagekite.net/
| gurchik wrote:
| I would recommend Racknerd as well. Not affiliated with them
| except a happy customer. I pay $36/yr for my 2 GB memory, 2
| vCPU, 50 GB SSD VPS that I run Nextcloud on. I also have a
| $16/yr VPS with 1.5 GB memory and 30 GB SSD for K3s
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Interesting. I hadn't heard of them. Their yearly prices are
| excellent.
|
| Not unlimited data though. But I'll keep them on my list,
| thanks
| lizknope wrote:
| You can find a lot of cheap VM instances at this site. I use
| buyvm.net and I've been happy with them the last 5 years.
|
| https://lowendbox.com/
| ringworld wrote:
| https://www.scaleway.com/en/stardust-instances/
|
| I am not a fan of the lottery approach and being told you're
| lucky to do business with them.
| jiripospisil wrote:
| I understand it more like a struggle to keep up it the demand
| for these instances and this was their attempt to "gamify"
| it.
| randomluck040 wrote:
| The lottery approach pissed me off so bad, I decided to leave
| Scaleway altogether. They also aren't upfront about their
| contingents. I wanted to try out an M1 instance and before
| registering and putting my credit card info in, it seemed
| like it'd be all fine, I just have to put in cc info. I did,
| they told me there are no instances available. The fair way
| would be to be upfront about it in my opinion.
| mike_d wrote:
| It isn't a lottery as much as an availability constraint.
|
| First you have a limit of 1 stardust per datacenter per
| customer. Second, they only spin up a fixed number of new
| stardust servers per day.
|
| It is a loss leader just like in any other business. They are
| losing money on one instance to get you in the door and you
| realize their other services are awesome.
| projektfu wrote:
| How do you fit a raspberry pi edge-wise (56.5mm) into a rack unit
| (44.5mm)?
| mbalyuzi wrote:
| This https://twitter.com/Merocle/status/1407684311344730117 is
| quite a nice approach, albeit using a CM4.
| kingcharles wrote:
| Very carefully.
| evan_ wrote:
| It looks like they have a rack that's 1U tall, but they only
| fill every few units to leave space for the pis. So in other
| words, it's 3U...
| whalesalad wrote:
| This is _neat_ but from a scaling perspective it doesn't make
| sense. A single server grade Xeon chip can expose the same
| compute power as a cluster of these devices, with better
| performance across the board (memory access, peripherals, etc)
|
| Just trying to grok a legit use case?
| flatiron wrote:
| Nervous people about spectre? Only thing I can think of besides
| renting a VM.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| The use case is greenwashing and separating people from their
| money because everyone thinks Pis are just the bee's knees.
|
| The Pentium G6400 outperforms a Pi4 4-5x, and has a 54W TDP
| (onboard GPU so at least part of that is for the GPU, so CPU-
| only workloads will be less.) The Ryzen 5600x is 65W and is
| twice as fast (at least) as the G6400...so in theory a 5600x is
| twice as energy efficient as a Pi4 if fully loaded. Sure this
| doesn't account for system fans and the motherboard, but they
| don't use that much compared to the CPU.
|
| The whole point of virtualization is that most systems are idle
| a lot of the time. At datacenter scale virtualization, you can
| dramatically over-provision and shut down/sleep unnecessary
| nodes, firing them up when you need to. You can get near 100%
| utilization on your hardware, making the very most of every
| watt that doesn't go to actually computing.
|
| Here they're going to have a zillion Pi4's, most of them
| sitting idle, but still using a couple watts. They're not even
| bothering to use any sort of shared power to improve PSU
| efficiency. They're not even bothering to use Pi4 compute
| modules.
|
| Now, the interesting bit is that now there's the Pi Zero
| Wireless 2. It has nearly the compute power of the 3B+, but the
| highest energy efficiency per watt of any Pi board so far...
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| > The Pentium G6400 outperforms a Pi4 4-5x, and has a 54W TDP
| (onboard GPU so at least part of that is for the GPU, so CPU-
| only workloads will be less.) The Ryzen 5600x is 65W and is
| twice as fast (at least) as the G6400...
|
| That's more energy efficient, sure. But it sets a lower
| boundary on the power draw much higher than a normal Pi. A Pi
| plus a single external HDD draws 12W at the socket, according
| to my measurements. A PC CPU draws 4-5x that, just by itself.
| The other components on the motherboard need power too, even
| if you use integrated graphics or no graphics at all.
|
| A PC only becomes more power-efficient if your load can't fit
| in three or more Pis. For plenty of uses, more than two Pis
| are an overkill.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I like the idea in theory, but I can't entirely agree with the
| "Green" designation. Putting 12 Raspberry Pis, 12 USB SSDs, 12
| switch ports, and cabling and power supplies for all of the above
| adds up quickly.
|
| From a pure compute-per-watt perspective using typical cloud
| workloads, I'd still expect a run of the mill shared cloud server
| to be more efficient. It would also allow for more burst overhead
| for individual workloads.
|
| This is an interesting option for people who need a specific
| Raspberry Pi hosted somewhere.
| piaste wrote:
| > This is an interesting option for people who need a specific
| Raspberry Pi hosted somewhere.
|
| What is that use case though? The page says that they only host
| regular Pis and optionally a USB SSD. So they can't do anything
| that a regular cloud server can't do - no custom hats, etc.
|
| I have a Pi 4 home server, and the biggest issue right now is
| that my home upload is a bit weak for remote video streaming.
| So this product could interest me, in theory - saves me from
| having to migrate all my data & configuration to a cloud
| server. But I would rather pay Hetzner a very similar amount of
| money to get a VPS that's about as powerful as a Pi (probably
| more) and still have the physical Pi here at home as a
| fallback.
|
| Maybe there are ARM-specialized, highly distributed tasks for
| which a fleet of Pis is particularly efficient?
| jo909 wrote:
| > I have a Pi 4 home server, and the biggest issue right now
| is that my home upload is a bit weak for remote video
| streaming.
|
| "To ensure that every Pi at our decentralized locations
| always has enough network throughput, the uplink and downlink
| is fixed at 10 Mbps."
|
| Not sure about your use case, but for me that is way less
| bandwidth than I have at home.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Edit: This is in response to the "fleet of Pi's" question,
| obviously a Mac Mini is not going to be cheaper to rent than
| a single Pi! The aforementioned VPS route is the better way
| to go for that case.
|
| Scaleway will give you an 8 core 16GB RAM 256GB SSD M1 Mac
| Mini for EUR0.1/h. It may not sound like much of an increase
| from core count but it is ~10x faster for multicore which
| means it probably comes out on top for perf/EUR, perf/Watt,
| and total perf compared to a rack of Pi 4's for any such
| distributed ARM use case.
|
| For pure traditional cloud a Graviton2 instance on AWS is
| probably more green, albeit probably less cost efficient to
| the user.
| selectodude wrote:
| That's EUR72/mo. Different price class there.
| zamadatix wrote:
| To be clear this isn't an alternative to hosting a single
| Pi it was in response to the distributed case:
|
| > Maybe there are ARM-specialized, highly distributed
| tasks for which a fleet of Pis is particularly efficient?
|
| Assuming the task really requires ARM, is perfectly
| scalable among multiple systems, doesn't require more
| than 10mbps between the nodes, and doesn't require
| dedicated control/scheduling nodes (i.e. best case for
| the Pi's) a _fleet_ in multiples of 10 Pi 's per would be
| $59.90 month each plus the up front cost of the Pi's,
| power adapters, SSDs, and shipping. And even if you wrote
| off the up front hardware as on hand it would still be
| significantly less green to run.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Raspberry Pis may be "green" in that they are cheap, but power
| efficient they aren't. They have barely any power management
| support, making their idle power usage higher than even some
| x86 chips.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > making their idle power usage higher than even some x86
| chips
|
| What x86 chip can idle on 4W when including RAM and the
| mainboard?
|
| I have some very low power J1900 boards, but even they idle
| on ~10W.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| It's not hard for x86 laptops to idle below 4W (see Surface
| https://www.notebookcheck.net/Microsoft-Surface-Go-
| Pentium-6... , even Pro ones with screen on they idle well
| below 10W). With 10W just for the SoC you get into desktop
| or gaming laptop territory.
|
| I have a full x86 system that idles at 1.7W _at the wall_
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639929 . This is an
| off-the-shelf ASUS PN40 mini-desktop, running an N4000, and
| includes 8GB RAM, a SATA SSD, and Gigabit ethernet, all
| running and accepting requests.
| erulabs wrote:
| Hey this is sort of the mirror opposite of my startup (we try to
| bring the internet to your home-pi, rather than ship your home-pi
| to a datacenter!). Neat tho! I'm not entirely sure it's that
| power efficient versus a carved up hypervisor tho...
| alexatalktome wrote:
| Oh my god you run KubeSail! Neat!
|
| I saw this and thought "can I use kube sail and host stuff in a
| mini cloud?"
| sokoloff wrote:
| I know that co-location means "customer owned hardware", but in
| this case, I think I'd way rather rent data center owned RPis and
| just pay them money rather than sending in hardware, having to
| cycle out hardware if/when it fails, etc.
|
| It also means the colo is running whatever random power supply I
| send them, which seems like something they'd want to avoid and
| means that there's all the inefficiency of 12 supplies per U
| rather than one beefy +5.1V supply (with battery backing) feeding
| the Pis via the GPIO pins.
| joosters wrote:
| Mythic Beasts do PI hosting with their own servers, and are a
| very good company: https://www.mythic-beasts.com/order/rpi
| klyrs wrote:
| I was hoping they'd have a DC power supply per rack, but their
| FAQ makes it clear that this is not the case. Bit of a missed
| opportunity there. Handling heterogeneous power supplies sounds
| like a nightmare.
| jagger27 wrote:
| What a bummer. Something like an 80PLUS Platinum ATX PC PSU
| could do around 40 amps on the 5V rails. Redundant server
| PSUs seem like an obvious choice here.
| [deleted]
| HideousKojima wrote:
| I've worked with a colo in the US that hosts Raspberry Pis and
| they required that you have a PoE hat, so no sending in a power
| supply.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| It looks like they have a custom built rack for the Pi, so
| supplying a custom 5v rail probably wouldn't be hard at all
| and would almost certainly be cheaper than large deployments
| of PoE switches.
| [deleted]
| geerlingguy wrote:
| It seems like either feeding 5v via custom power supply on GPIO
| or requiring PoE HATs (though those are slightly less
| efficient...) would be a better scalable option.
|
| One massive thing that seems to be missing here (unless I've
| missed it) is any kind of remote ability to manage the server,
| eg at a minimum remote power cycling, if the Pi locks up. It
| would also be nice to get remote console but that would require
| even more effort and potentially slight customization on the
| Pis' boot config (to enable UART).
| sokoloff wrote:
| Agree, a central supply with a 3A MOSFET for control and a
| PTC for basic protection would give a lot more functionality
| and reduce customer downtime and smart-hands touches.
| RL_Quine wrote:
| At that point what you're describing has little resemblance
| to a hosted RPI though, the complexity justifies just
| making something custom that's better suited to the task
| than shoe horning Raspberry Pi hardware into a rack.
| danachow wrote:
| Sorry but that's bullshit.. they're describing a basic
| power switch (even simpler than a PoE hat) which is
| nothing compared to the design complexity of an MCU board
| with memory, peripherals and chip level power conversion.
| prirun wrote:
| They also sell PI Instances for $2.88/mo:
|
| https://examesh.de/en/instances/pi/
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Wait, renting is more than a dollar cheaper than colocating?
| 1MachineElf wrote:
| At least this offering eliminates the threat vector a of
| compromised hypervisor.
| ZiiS wrote:
| Realy needs a secure boot option.
| paulcole wrote:
| How exactly is it exclusive?
| anyfactor wrote:
| I bet everyone who has a raspberry pi had this idea. Throwing a
| raspberry pi with a solar panel and a sim card to a random place.
| It could be for backup, vpn or to access some private network.
| But having it be a rackmounted VM in a fixed location doesn't
| sound that fun to me.
| aofeisheng wrote:
| > What is the traffic limit?
|
| > It's 2021. We don't have a traffic limit for a Raspberry Pi.
|
| > What is the data transfer rate?
|
| > The data rate is synchronously set to 10 Mbit/s per Raspberry.
|
| It's 2021, and you think 10 Mbit/s is enough.
| [deleted]
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> It's 2021, and you think 10 Mbit/s is enough._
|
| I mean, not to disagree here, but that's pretty much the
| average internet speed in some third world countries, like
| Austria for example. :)
| tiagod wrote:
| So, a single person in such country would be enough to
| saturate the server...
| jagger27 wrote:
| I can't imagine having any hardware colocated without proper out-
| of-band KVM access. Who is going to drive out to the wind turbine
| and flash a new disk image to my Pi?
|
| 10Mbps is also excruciatingly slow. I was ready to see a 100Mbps
| cap.
| bennyp101 wrote:
| From https://examesh.de/en/docs/colocation/accessing-the-pi/ :
|
| "Instead of using a public IP the Pi is accessed by combining a
| public hostname with dedicated TCP ports. The hostname points to
| one of the ExaMesh gateways and is assigned to the colocation
| along with the available TCP ports in the booking process."
|
| So maybe useful for an extra node for redundency, but maybe not
| as useful as having an actual address. Perhaps an extra encrypted
| Syncthing node or something
| buildbuildbuild wrote:
| I think they'll need to iterate a bit to find product market fit.
| The 10mbit bandwidth limit, calling it "Decentralized", no public
| IP downsides are off-putting even at this price.
| holri wrote:
| In Vienna/Austria there is a rpi or similar housing with a real
| ipv4 address:
|
| https://www.easyserver.at/serverhousing
| RL_Quine wrote:
| The description of "decentralized" seems to be a little weak
| here.
| joosters wrote:
| Somewhat ironically, I'd guess that putting a server inside a
| wind turbine makes it _less_ likely that you are utilising green
| energy. The power and comms connections to that location are
| there primarily to monitor the turbine, and they want that to
| work all the time, and _especially_ when the blades aren 't
| turning. So you don't go powering it with the wind farm itself.
|
| Installing the server anywhere else means there is a chance that
| its power is being generated by that wind turbine!
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| One could power the equipment off the turbine when it's
| operating, and off an alternative supply otherwise.
|
| It seems a little silly to worry about where the specific
| electrons came from to power the equipment, though. If powering
| that equipment enables a wind turbine to produce more power
| than it would have without that equipment, then it seems like
| the existence of that equipment is "green" whether or not its
| power came from dirtier sources.
| mike_d wrote:
| Wind turbines generate 690v three phase. It isn't stepped
| down until it gets to a substation near the consumer.
|
| The power needed onsite (lights, control systems, energy to
| start the blades spinning, etc) usually comes from a natural
| gas generator or a direct feed from a fossil fuel plant if
| one is nearby. Due to circular dependencies, you can't power
| them off the energy they generate.
| mr_sturd wrote:
| EDIS offered a colo service for free, back in the early RPi days.
|
| I had two gen 1.5 machines hosted with them; one with OwnCloud,
| and another hosted my music via SFTP.
| bullen wrote:
| gen 1.5? Are they still running those for free?
|
| I had "free" colocations in Sweden and Holland that then turned
| not free then got cancelled altogether.
|
| Pi clusters are best for home hosting on your own fiber.
|
| Also those Pi 4 need heatsinks like so:
| http://move.rupy.se/file/final_pi_2_4_hybrid.png
| mr_sturd wrote:
| They were a revision of the first gen Raspberry Pi. A bit
| more stable and seemed to not corrupt the root filesystem
| after a few hours, which the initial one seemed to invariably
| do for me.
|
| They're not offering it any more, no.
|
| I moved to self-hosting after that. Even got a static IP
| address for it.
| smarx007 wrote:
| > To ensure that every Pi at our decentralized locations always
| has enough network throughput, the uplink and downlink is fixed
| at 10 Mbps.
|
| Ok, thx, I have a 100/10 Mpbs link at home. The only reason I'd
| place my Pi in a colo is to get 100/100 Mpbs or 1 Gbit network.
|
| Edit: https://contabo.com/en/vps/ (200Mpbs in the cheapest plan)
| or https://www.seedhost.eu/ (1/10G) is not too far from the
| EUR6,- price mark and I don't have to own the hardware.
| roughly wrote:
| I totally understand all of the drawbacks here, I agree that it's
| hard to think of an actual use case, and all that aside, there's
| something aesthetically pleasing here in an "I'd read about this
| in a William Gibson novel" kind of way. "My compute fleet is
| distributed across a field of windmills in Europe" just _sounds_
| cool.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I wonder how they mirror the raspberry pis without destroying
| them.
|
| (Look at their cad drawing of 12 pis in a rack.)
| walrus01 wrote:
| I think I'd rather have a decently specced KVM VM on a x86-64
| hypervisor somewhere, I can run mainline debian on, for $6/mo
| than a raspberry pi. For that money if you look you can get
| something with 2 pseudo cores, 2 gigs of ram, and probably 40GB
| of storage.
|
| At least I can have more confidence that the storage won't
| spontaneously fail, and network throughput greater than 10 Mbps.
|
| This seems like a cool _idea_ and all and it 's certainly cheap
| for hobby projects. But I wonder how viable it really is as a
| business model. Doing the math on person-hour costs if just one
| pi requires 15 minutes of support/human attention from a person
| at the ISP, once, you're losing money on that customer forever.
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