A fad it may be, but I can attest to them having actual Raspberry Pi devices in colo or at least spending a lot of effort to make it seem like they've put mine

A fad it may be, but I can attest to them having actual Raspberry Pi devices in colo or at least spending a lot of effort to make it seem like they've put mine in colo (more effort than would be required to just plug in the silly thing). I had a spare Pi sitting around so I loaded it up with a decent SD card, a USB stick, and a barebones Raspbian config and sent it off. It now functions as a backup MX, secondary DNS, a VPN endpoint, and a remote monitor of sorts. It doesn't have to be powerful because I'm the only one using it. Since it costs me EUR0/month, why not? Isn't that what hobbyist tinkering is about?