Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!


Dedicated Raspberry Pi 3+, what would you pay?
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.

Dedicated Raspberry Pi 3+, what would you pay?

terrahostterrahost Member, Patron Provider
edited April 2019 in General

Hello,

We are currently developing a custom PCB which allows us to host up to 84 Raspberry PI 3+ (Model B )'s per 2U, excluding switches. This amounts to around 840 Pi's per rack. Our question is, what would you pay for it?

We will most likely be looking for beta testers in 1-2 months time. Will get back to you all on that :)

Guess you'd like to know the specs. The board we've developed is pretty unique. It has KVM-like console access directly in our control panel (!), and remote reboot and reset functionality!

So, the specs are:

Raspberry Pi 3+ (Model B )
64GB SDXC Storage
100GB NAS Storage (NFS or iSCSI)
100Mbit port
Unmetered bandwidth

Additional features:
Console access
Remote reboot
Automated OS installs

Let us know what you think about this idea, and more specifically, what would it be worth to you. If you have any input we'd of course be open to hear your ideas!

«13

Comments

  • quickquick Member

    7$

  • sinsin Member

    Maybe around $10/month? Sounds like a really neat idea and I would love to play around with one.

  • emghemgh Member

    No. 10 per year.

    Thanked by 1bendikapp
  • MasonRMasonR Community Contributor

    I'd be a buyer in the $5-7/mo range. Your main competition will be the €3 Scaleway C1 ARM BareMetal server.

  • JunJun Member

    I remember a couple free raspberry pi colocations some companies experimentally offered. Not sure if I want to pay for it. I'd prefer scaleaway. I don't think raspberry pi or sd cards are suitable for servers.

  • FastmakoFastmako Member, Host Rep

    Scaleway already has ARM C1 dedicated hosting, starting from €3 (with 50gb storage). For selling Raspberry Pi 3+ hosting, it will have to be of about same price or lower, because there is no point in paying much over time, when the board itself is ~$35.

  • Definitely in the same ball park as Scaleway C1. The C1 might not come with 100GB extra storage, but it has an unmetered 200Mbps port (can burst @ 1Gbps). I think < 5$/m would be reasonable.

    Thanked by 1rm_
  • williewillie Member
    edited April 2019

    Geez this was a thing in 2013 or so. These days there is still the Scaleway C1, there are 5 euro/m Kimsufi Atoms, etc. I think Rpi hosting was a cool idea back in the day, but the time has gone. Hetzner had an Odroid-based server for a while but gave up on it. Also, keeping the Pis running might be harder than you expect. SDXC cards fail all the time, the pi's have their own problems, etc. They use around 7W of power running flat out, so 840 of them is around 6KW which is a lot for one rack. And at the end of the day an rpi still has less compute power than you'd have with even a fairly weak conventional VPS, though you can use it all the time.

    I think you have to price at the Scaleway C1 level (3 euro/m) for the product to be interesting at all. From the hosting end that's probably not attractive. Scaleway still offers the C1 but I think it is a legacy product for them by now, and they are not trying to deploy new ones. They also seem to be EOL'ing their Cavium-based ARM servers.

    This just doesn't seem like a promising proposition even if it's technically cool from a hardware perspective. I've had a C1 for some years but it's been hard to find a real use for it. And the C1 is actually 2 euro/m if you don't need the ipv4 internet connection.

    The box containing 84 rpi's might conceivably be of interest for some parallel computing purposes (put everything on one network connection) but that too would probably be hard to price competitively, given the cost of the hardware. You'd have to set up some special workloads for it where it offered significant cost advantages over the usual x86 stuff. Or if it was billed hourly people could try it out, though such products haven't been successful in the past so far. Scaleway's 64 core arm64 vps with 128gb of memory is still available at 0.56 eur/hour and I think there are not many takers.

    Sorry to be the party pooper but that's how I see it.

    Thanked by 2uptime Dwayne
  • Around $3

  • edited April 2019

    Ya, honestly, it might be cool but won't be price competitive. Basically, you won't see ROI. If you are using it as learning exp, that's another story. (pave the way to more powerful ARM later on)

    Typically, eMMC, (that is faster than rpi's SDcard) should be used if you can get it to work. But it is flash and has limited write and I think it is not easy to replace like SDcard.

    If you could add SATA, it would be cool.

    For both eMMC and SATA, not sure if rpi/armh has those drivers or hardware interfaces though. Good Luck!

  • Little ARM dedi or VPS, sure. :smile: RPi, not really. The hardware limitations of the RPi are well known, and working with the SD card isn't great.

    Maybe something like a Pine64 ROCKPro64? https://www.pine64.org/?page_id=61454
    Firefly ROC-RK3328-CC? http://shop.t-firefly.com/goods.php?id=65
    Something from SolidRun? https://www.solid-run.com/marvell-armada-family/clearfog/

    I like the idea and features. I'm just not sure about the hardware. :smile:

    Thanked by 1uptime
  • uptimeuptime Member
    edited April 2019

    for some time now mythic beasts have been offering pi3 (not pi 3b+ as far as I can tell)

    https://www.mythic-beasts.com/order/rpi

    1 GB ram, 4 cores

    £5.75 monthly + £0.25 per 10 GB NFS storage

    ipv6 with ipv4 NAT for ssh and http/s

    1 TB traffic @ 100 mbps, located in London

    Interesting although not particularly compelling in terms of price/performance.

  • I have used Scaleway ARM bare-metal before as a light seedbox and it worked fine for me. I only wonder what value proposition this setup has relative to say a Kimsufi Atom that I have. The Atom is a weak processor, but ARM is worse. I would say that the most likely use case is just for cold storage or light seedbox given the 100Mbps connection, and there is already plenty of viable options at a great price with either VPS setup or Atom bare metal. Your best shot is to compete on price, but I don't know what the ROI will be like factoring in all thr maintenence cost.

  • FAT32FAT32 Administrator, Deal Compiler Extraordinaire
    edited April 2019

    I believe the main purpose of RPi3 is for development purpose, using it as a server might not utilise the full use of it. For me I would probably pay $2/m to experiment with different stuff, if more than that I would better get a VPS that should have higher performance.

    EDIT: Some interesting things you could do is rent to own, given that you can fit about 42 per 1U, you can charge something like $1-2/m for colocation after the user has paid for a year or so.

    Thanked by 2bap vinothmoorthy
  • If I wanted an rpi for development I'd just buy one and use it at home. Why I'd want one in a data center is a slightly harder question.

    Thanked by 2FAT32 poisson
  • @willie said:
    If I wanted an rpi for development I'd just buy one and use it at home. Why I'd want one in a data center is a slightly harder question.

    So you are saying you dont want to download pr0n 24/7 in a 100mbit connection?

  • reikuzan said: So you are saying you dont want to download pr0n 24/7 in a 100mbit connection?

    To an SD card? Nah. I have a VPS with more compute power and a TB of HDD space for under $3 a month iirc, no need for the pi. Also have a Kimsufi with around 4TB of space for under $10.

  • TheLinuxBugTheLinuxBug Member
    edited April 2019

    Why not use something like an Orange Pi Plus 2E H3 device, has built on 16GB emmc, SDcard and Gigabit ethernet? Also has dedicated USB 2.0 port without a HUB in the middle meaning if you use a decent USB stick you can at least max out USB 2.0, where as USB on the RPi is through a shared hub.

    Performance would be much better than a RPi and if its running in a DC environment with good passive cooling, then a simple heatsink on it would be enough for heat dissipation.

    That said, I read after typing this you have a custom board or setup for this in mind, so it may not fit that platform and could be more expensive to implement than what you had in mind, making my suggestion moot.

    my 2 cents.

    Cheers!

  • Well, there's an old provider like fitvps with raspberry on ~2016 on $5/month

    Now I have my own Raspi running my own server + blockchain explorer + home monitoring. SO if it went more than $5/month, maybe I will choose vps instead.

    BuyVM smallest vps comes with KVM, 512MB memory, 10GB and unmetered bandwidth. If I need more storage, just add some slabs

    Just my opinion

  • zhujizhuji Member

    very good. i want buy it. 200$

  • @zhuji said:
    very good. i want buy it. 200$

    do you even know what you're talking about?

  • rm_rm_ IPv6 Advocate, Veteran
    edited April 2019

    terrahost said: what would it be worth to you.

    Two euro.

    sin said: Maybe around $10/month?

    Here's what many of us here on LET have:

    i5-2400 [email protected] GHz
    16 GB RAM
    2 TB disk
    100 MBit unmetered
    
    9.99 EUR

    What "$10/month" for raspberry pi, are you healthy in the head?

  • terrahostterrahost Member, Patron Provider

    @Jun said:
    I remember a couple free raspberry pi colocations some companies experimentally offered. Not sure if I want to pay for it. I'd prefer scaleaway. I don't think raspberry pi or sd cards are suitable for servers.

    We will most likely offer some kind of dirt cheap colo aswell.

    greattomeetyou said: Typically, eMMC, (that is faster than rpi's SDcard) should be used if you can get it to work. But it is flash and has limited write and I think it is not easy to replace like SDcard.

    I like the idea and features. I'm just not sure about the hardware.

    We can use anything with the same GPIO pins as the raspberry. So it can be different hardware on the same PCB.

    TheLinuxBug said: Why not use something like an Orange Pi Plus 2E H3 device, has built on 16GB emmc, SDcard and Gigabit ethernet?

    We will definitely look into it. They fit right on our board, as they have the same GPIO pinout as the Pi. Interesting board :)

  • terrahost said: dirt cheap colo

    Norway? Or where? Hmm.

  • terrahostterrahost Member, Patron Provider

    @willie said:

    terrahost said: dirt cheap colo

    Norway? Or where? Hmm.

    Yes, Norway. :)

  • I think that has been tried too (rpi colo) and it could be a cool hobby project but it just doesn't seem viable as a going commercial product. It could be fun to make it super duper cheap: use a pi zero (usb networking) instead of pi3, and NAT internet with a reasonable bandwidth cap. It could almost reach LowEndSpirit pricing, amazing for a dedicated server.

  • This has SATA, that means you can provide different HDD/SSD

    http://www.orangepi.org/orangepiplus2/

    Are you designing it or just put these off the shelf boards into the rack???

  • edited April 2019

    willie said: pi zero (usb networking)

    pi zero, would be interesting but very low end.

    using external USB to Ethernet??

  • AnthonySmithAnthonySmith Member, Patron Provider

    Sign me up, I think if you want to sell them in large numbers €5 p/month, personally I would (and will) pay up to €10.00 p/month as I want a cloud Amiga (assuming we can install our own distro's)

Sign In or Register to comment.