Raspberry Pi Colocation
pi-colocation.com
Raspberry Pi Colocation
1–10 of 149 posts
Re: Raspberry Pi Colocation
#2I 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.
Re: Raspberry Pi Colocation
#3I 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.
Re: Raspberry Pi Colocation
#4From 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
Re: Raspberry Pi Colocation
#5I 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 wor…
> 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?
Re: Raspberry Pi Colocation
#6I 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 pe…
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Re: Raspberry Pi Colocation
#7Somewhat 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!
Re: Raspberry Pi Colocation
#8I 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 pe…
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).
Re: Raspberry Pi Colocation
#9I 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 pe…
Mythic Beasts do PI hosting with their own servers, and are a very good company: https://www.mythic-beasts.com/order/rpi
Re: Raspberry Pi Colocation
#10I 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 pe…
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…
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.