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Can this be a big competitor to expensive cloud hosting companies?
The Advantages of expensive AWS (et al) hosting is that much anymore if RaspberryPi clusters with this setup can handle high traffic sites. https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/website-hosting-on-raspberry-pi-4-with-mythic-beasts/ The only real advantages i think for AWS hosting (advantages which can be replicated in the PIs) is (1) Distributed Data centers (2) Ease of use. What are your thoughts?
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoAWS is more than just rental hardware. If you’re only looking at hardware, Rasperry Pis aren’t even the cheapest or easiest option. However, you still need some place to put them, some reliable bandwidth, someone to manage them, spares to replace the ones that fail, and so on. In terms of hiring engineers to manage all of that, AWS is actually exceedingly cheap by comparison.
- patchthecode 5y ago(1) Needing a place to put them. isnt that much of a problem since we can are hosting for our site only. Therefore its only about 7 RaspberryPis (which is way more than we'll get from AWS). 7 PIs can be chucked in a cool corner. Ventilation/overheating is easy for 7 PIs. (2) someone to manage them is that hard either since its only 7-Pis. (3) spares to replace the ones that fail etc etc - again -- It appears to me that points #1, #2, #3 will only be problematic if the life-span of a PI with this setup is low. But it appears that since the setup has no SD-cards, it can last more than a year + . This isnt bad at all for 7 PIs. (4) I think the only problem is bandwidth -- I have not looked into this because I didnt think of it. Let me look into this now.
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoNo one should be managing 7 Rasperry Pis as a server farm unless it’s for fun. Get or build a cheap server, install ESXi or Proxmox, and run virtual machines. Perform automated backups of the server. Once you add up all of the costs of Rasperry Pis, non-SD card storage, PoE hats (as used in this article), cases, and most of all the time spent managing this architecture, it’s not actually cheap at all. Fine for tinkering, not practical for actual work.
- patchthecode 5y agothe conclusion you stated here is what everyone says --> "Fine for tinkering, not practical for actual work." And that is the exact reason why i posted this here. Because i do not have a good reason as to "why NOT have it as a production server" when (1) those guys in the article did just that and served millions of requests per day (2) they even have a hosting service of Raspberry PIs and have had this going pretty well for some time. These are all examples of PIs used in production, but everyone still says "dont do it" and my question is why? The difficulties you mentioned above is easily accounted for, so i was wondering if there was any other points i was missing?
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoSame reason nobody hosts their production website on a Celeron box in the corner of the office: Production hosting is about more than just requests per second. The Pi server thing is a proof of concept that ignores everything else that goes into production hosting. You can do it, it’s just going to be miserable like any self hosting, slower than any x86 hardware, and require the equivalent of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars of engineering time just to accomplish what you could get with a few clicks and 15 minutes with AWS. There’s a reason their hosted Rasperry Pi service is more expensive than getting an EC2 micro instance: https://www.mythic-beasts.com/order/rpi https://www.mythic-beasts.com/order/rpi
- patchthecode 5y agohmm. ok then. thanks. I will take the things you have said into consideration.
- patchthecode 5y agoalso keep in mind. This is not for a server farm for the public. This is for my own high traffic website.
- tsjq 5y agobackup power, backup network connection, data redundancy, security, etc factors
- patchthecode 5y agobackup power, backup network connection, data redundancy, security, etc factors. These are all indeed good points. But is this not very, very easily done with just 7 rpi? I guess I was looking for technical limitations that will make it a dumb idea. IMO, it was a dumb idea just 10 years ago, but now things have progressed which make setting up something like this literally point and click. Back up power? --> Easily done for 7 rpi. Backup network connection -->get at least 2 carriers. Data redundancy --> A couple RAID drives. Security? --> how is security any different than what we already use with current web providers? Basically, The things you mention were hard to do in the past. But today 2021, there are whole DockerContainers built with every hardened security measure built-in with one click. The reason why I know its easy is because I have built sites on them. And after doing it for a while, I'm starting to think, do i really need AWS?
- tsjq 5y agonice points. and I agree with you
- patchthecode 5y agoBasically what i was really questioning was --> Has the barrier to entry gotten so low now, that the average joe can now roll his own server? Things which were difficult to do in the past is now extremely easy to do.