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Comment by programminggeek | Hacker News Reader

Am I weird for wanting to use this for really simple web hosting?

IMO the pogoplug is really simple to reload with Arch Linux and it's super cheap. However, it's worth noting that it's really lacking in horsepower when compared with the Pi and other contemporary offerings. But for ~15 USD shipped, it's astonishingly affordable.

http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv5/pogoplug-series-4

Not particularly - there are several datacenters that offer raspberry pi servers as a commercial offering.

I can't remember the name of the one near me (had a slick photo of black and green pi cases on their dc floor), but a little googling found this one: http://raspberrycolocation.com/

hosting pis without needing/being able to access gpio and such is a silly marketing fad. it must be so ineffective in term of space and heat that i would be surprised that they have a single beefy server running several pis in emulation for the clients.

A fad it may be, but I can attest to them having actual Raspberry Pi devices in colo or at least spending a lot of effort to make it seem like they've put mine in colo (more effort than would be required to just plug in the silly thing). I had a spare Pi sitting around so I loaded it up with a decent SD card, a USB stick, and a barebones Raspbian config and sent it off. It now functions as a backup MX, secondary DNS, a VPN endpoint, and a remote monitor of sorts.

It doesn't have to be powerful because I'm the only one using it. Since it costs me EUR0/month, why not? Isn't that what hobbyist tinkering is about?

ah. you can send your device with all the things attached that you want?

Sometimes people do things for fun rather than economic maximisation.

Nope. The Pi makes a lot of sense for a simple web server with a robust SQL/NOSQL database backend running with Node/Go. If you have a good internet connection with a good upload speed, you can easily run a server able to take a couple of hundred hits a minute. It is certainly a better option than using the cloud for prototyping, where a wrong for loop can instantiate loads of instances and bill you a hell lot.

The Pi does not make sense for any level of consumer-targeted production (dev, stage or live) beyond "oh hey, it works." "A couple of hundred hits a minute" is also not impressive in the least, even for something of the Pi's stature.

I also don't think the stack would matter all that much at this point - IO blocking would be happening at the application level, not the architectural. Node, Go, Ruby, Python, PHP ... it really wouldn't matter. SQL versus NoSQL is also a non-issue in this case.

I also wouldn't take something very underpowered instead of the cloud just because I hadn't configured my cloud host to keep things within reason (ie no autoscaling at all, which is what you'd expect for hobby-level prototyping.

tldr; don't eschew better options for the Pi unless you don't understand how your cloud host works.

I agree it makes no sense for consumer-targeted production. I have played with the pi and run a small robot to collect intermittent data from twitter and store it on Mongo, which I can remotely access using the web service. At the same time, I would not want to go all the way to the cloud for such a small thing. I guess it depends on the use-case.

OTOH you could front a pi-based server with Pagekite (pagekite.net) and get the best of both worlds.

Do you think your ISP will let your host a webserver without asking them first?

What server software would you ideally run on the PI 2? Would it be reasonable to have it use a home internet connection?

Node.js is probably already included. I'm running that on my BeagleBone Black.

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