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Self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi cluster

savannahostrowski.com

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Re: Self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi cluster

#11

Post by emanuele232 »

nicolaslem wrote: post #9
8fingerlouie wrote: post #8

I get it, self hosting is fun (until user count is > 1), but I wonder how long a $6 VPS would be able to handle the same load before you'd "break even" with the cost of 4 Pi's, as well as the ~12W required to run them, as well as the 5-7W required to power the switch. Assuming it's 20W in total, that's 14.5 kWh/month, which even as US prices of $0.15/kWh adds up to $2.15 per month. In Europe you're closer to €5/month…

From my experience, being comfortable with networks and systems outside the cloud is a valuable skill that not a ton of people possess. It may be surprising to some of you, but there is an entire generation of syadmin/devops that have never touched a switch or a bare metal server.

yup, i belong to the already-cloud generation, having a capable router+ a couple of raspberries have taught me a lot

Re: Self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi cluster

#12

Post by emanuele232 »

papichulo2023 wrote: post #6

For fun is okay, but you can buy a single computer more powerful than those 4x Pi for 500 bucks. Pi has stopped being cost effective a long while ago.

i have a raspberry pi3 (4gb, 50 euros) and a pi5 (8gb, 100 euros). i run a k0s cluster (for fun) w/ pihole, plex, some monitoring and homeassistant. that for me is cost effective

Re: Self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi cluster

#13

Post by vanilla_nut »

NAHWheatCracker wrote: post #4

I have some Raspberry Pis that I self host stuff on. Gitlab on one, Runtipi on another, and pi-hole + Nginx + a game I made on a third. Some of it is publicly accessible on my own domains, but the only traffic I actually get is from myself. I connect my Pis to my WiFi router and I've struggled with the adapters, so a POE switch might be interesting. I should containerize stuff, but I enjoy running it directly as well…

Only time I've ever had an issue is when I manually disconnected power from a Pi 4 when I overreacted to a network outage. I was dumb and thought my Pi's DNS was screwing things up for the whole network, but it turns out that it was just Spectrum screwing things up for the entire region. Fortunately there was only one minor corrupted file, it didn't bork the SD card, and I was able to repair the setup manually.

I've never had any problem as long as I've stuck with the `sudo shutdown` command, which powers down in a controlled manner so writes don't get interrupted. But I've also never had an issue after a power outage, so I think somehow power outage shutdowns are more graceful than just yanking the power cable out.

If you're really concerned, you can always configure your Pi to use a read-only root filesystem. Combine that with a USB SSD to store your _actual_ data and you should be OK indefinitely. Or just boot from that USB SSD -- just remember to configure fstab correctly for your intended behaviour! You might be surprised to discover that fstab can delay a boot indefinitely if mounting expectations do not match reality.

Re: Self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi cluster

#14

Post by jeromechoo »

NAHWheatCracker wrote: post #4

I have some Raspberry Pis that I self host stuff on. Gitlab on one, Runtipi on another, and pi-hole + Nginx + a game I made on a third. Some of it is publicly accessible on my own domains, but the only traffic I actually get is from myself. I connect my Pis to my WiFi router and I've struggled with the adapters, so a POE switch might be interesting. I should containerize stuff, but I enjoy running it directly as well…

I’ve had 3 SD cards fail on me in the last year. I now avoid using them as serious long term storage.

To be fair, these SD cards were exposed to fairly extreme Texas temperatures. One in a car dashcam, the other in an outdoor camera.

Re: Self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi cluster

#16

Post by kjkjadksj »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #8

I get it, self hosting is fun (until user count is > 1), but I wonder how long a $6 VPS would be able to handle the same load before you'd "break even" with the cost of 4 Pi's, as well as the ~12W required to run them, as well as the 5-7W required to power the switch. Assuming it's 20W in total, that's 14.5 kWh/month, which even as US prices of $0.15/kWh adds up to $2.15 per month. In Europe you're closer to €5/month…

$6 vps probably has no storage. E.g 5tb hetzner box is more like $14 a month. Pis are absurd though for homelabbing today, prices have not fallen relative to other cheap compute. For the price of a $90 pi you can get a used mini pc with an i5 8500 with memory and storage on ebay today. Double that and you can get a new asus minipc with an 8 core 9700t. All with a case and psu. The asus minis are even designed to stack nicely as a cluster arrangement.

Re: Self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi cluster

#17

Post by kjkjadksj »

emanuele232 wrote: post #12
papichulo2023 wrote: post #6

For fun is okay, but you can buy a single computer more powerful than those 4x Pi for 500 bucks. Pi has stopped being cost effective a long while ago.

i have a raspberry pi3 (4gb, 50 euros) and a pi5 (8gb, 100 euros). i run a k0s cluster (for fun) w/ pihole, plex, some monitoring and homeassistant. that for me is cost effective

You can get a 9th gen intel pc for that today in the us. Maybe not in eu ebay but in us for sure. New n100 mini pc from china companies also clock in around that total price.

Re: Self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi cluster

#18

Post by chadsix »

8fingerlouie wrote: post #8

I get it, self hosting is fun (until user count is > 1), but I wonder how long a $6 VPS would be able to handle the same load before you'd "break even" with the cost of 4 Pi's, as well as the ~12W required to run them, as well as the 5-7W required to power the switch. Assuming it's 20W in total, that's 14.5 kWh/month, which even as US prices of $0.15/kWh adds up to $2.15 per month. In Europe you're closer to €5/month…

When you put your data on a third party host, you can basically kiss it goodbye -- "trusting" that host means you have to trust every single employee in it.

For the peace of mind, I'd even pay more -- but it's significantly cheaper in the long run to self host since those 'cheap shared-resource' virtual servers are always oversold.

But to each his own.

Re: Self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi cluster

#19

Post by dewbrite »

Cool stuff! I built a similar cluster of Orange Pi 5s with NVMe drives. For IP masking I'm paying for a $3.50 VPS to have nginx forward raw packets.

Fwiw Cloudflare Proxy and, to a lesser extent Tunnels, are de facto MITM attacks. I don't exactly trust large unprofitable corporations to do the right thing when they decrypt all of my and my users' traffic.

Not that CF is a malicious entity, but, the potential for them to be used as one is a looming threat. Then again, so is any VPS you host on :^)

Re: Self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi cluster

#20

Post by 8fingerlouie »

chadsix wrote: post #18
8fingerlouie wrote: post #8

I get it, self hosting is fun (until user count is > 1), but I wonder how long a $6 VPS would be able to handle the same load before you'd "break even" with the cost of 4 Pi's, as well as the ~12W required to run them, as well as the 5-7W required to power the switch. Assuming it's 20W in total, that's 14.5 kWh/month, which even as US prices of $0.15/kWh adds up to $2.15 per month. In Europe you're closer to €5/month…

When you put your data on a third party host, you can basically kiss it goodbye -- "trusting" that host means you have to trust every single employee in it. For the peace of mind, I'd even pay more -- but it's significantly cheaper in the long run to self host since those 'cheap shared-resource' virtual servers are always oversold. But to each his own.

> When you put your data on a third party host, you can basically kiss it goodbye -- "trusting" that host means you have to trust every single employee in it.

Or you encrypt your data as well as backup your data somewhere else.

Besides, on the scale we're talking here, a workload that can be handled by 3 RPI's (or a VPS), do you really have such sentivie data ?

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