Here is the thing, I have 4 RPi’s of different generations (all the way from Zero W to 4B 4GB) that I use to host services at home for personal use.
Lately, I have realized I am running out of RAM to host more services, not to mention not enough switch ports to connect to.
Now I know the obvious solution is to get a more powerful setup (maybe a thin client) but electricity isn’t cheap and I am not particularly in the best shape financially speaking to shell out $300+ on a decent client to host my services.
Any suggestions?
Power to performance wise a pi isn’t actually that good. A thin client can run on less than 60W and offer far more performance
60W vs 3-4W isn’t really a fair comparison…
My N100 MiniPC runs on ~10w
Even raspberry pi 4 doesn’t run on 3-4w, it’s probably for the older models and zeros
Rpi4 is more like 5-6w, and 8-10w theoretically
RPI5 is 12-15w theoretically
Rpi5’s power supply is actually 27w, my thinkcentre’s power supply is 60w
Rpi5 has a 2.4ghz 4cores
My thinkcentre has 2.4-5ghz 8cores 16threads
Also, arm is fun, but it’s a headache to selfhost a lot of stuff on it
And really, I moved from RPI hosting to x86-64, I didn’t know some apps like jellyfin, or elk, or basically anything can open instantly. Even nextcloud is working pretty well
And you can put an ssd inside, or even two, or even do some soldering a put 3 ssds inside
I’m even starting on RAM which you can buy and replace