Ask HN: Would you pay for ARM-based dedicated instances?

3 points·karakanb··8 comments

Would you be willing to pay for a dedicated ARM-based instances, potentially less than 5 dollars per month for a dedicated Raspberry Pi 4 with 2GB RAM?

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Yes and no. Not at this price: for 5$/mo you can have a real dedicated server (not a VPS) by kimsufi provider for example. Also 1 year of rental at 3-4$/mo = you have spent the same price as buying and owning one.

That is true indeed, but there's a cost for having your instance, proper cases, cooling the instances down, securing them, ensuring proper networking and more, pretty much the same stuff as a regular cloud, that's why I was wondering if people would be interested.

For the yes part, what would be the monthly price you'd be willing to pay?

You're right, all these aspects are important. If you add all these costs, such as electricty cost (3W * 24hr * 31day / 1000 * 0.15$/kwh ~ 0.33$/mo), it's hard to be both profitable and competitive. I'd pay maybe 2 or 2.50$ / mo, but I'm probably not a good example because I like running my own RPi at home and be able to tune things. Nice project anyway, good luck for staring your service!

If I had an application that required ARM, else no.

Even then it's extremely unlikely I don't consider the Pi 4 reliable enough to justify paying to have one professionally hosted.

I think similar prices are available on scaleway. Atleast the scaleway ones were very slow (but this a year or two ago).

what would be the benefit of this versus a reserved t4g instance on EC2, for example?

The sellers are usually $1.99-2.99 for this.

Do you have some example sellers in mind?

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