2y ago

Raspberry Pi alternatives for headless self hosted applications

Since rpis have been almost impossible to find, I've been looking around for alternatives for some local self hosted services like home assistant. A lot of boards seem to talk about GPU, GPIO pins, etc. But I really just want a single board, fanless (low power), decent CPU and RAM, ethernet.

Any recommendations?

9 comments

I gave up on using raspberry pi for running servers.
I ended up buying a $60 lenovo on ebay https://www.servethehome.com/lenovo-thinkcentre-m710q-tiny-guide-and-ce-review/2/ and then loaded it up with 32GB of ram. Now I run a proxmox hypervisor and around 20+ containers/VMs. Best decision I ever made. I just spin up servers willy nilly
If you don't need GPIO then run a hypervisor. Cheaper than SBCs and more useful.
- I use a pi for servers because of the assumption that it uses very little power to run (compared to say, an old unused laptop), is that not the case?
  
  Sure, but I just told you I'm running over 20 servers. Try running 20 raspberry pi's 😀
  My resources are being shared for around 20W of power.
hp t530 or dell wyse 3040 or 5070 thin clients
It’s not that difficult to get a Pi 4. I wrote a python script that scraped rpilocator’s rss feed every 5 minutes and would notify my phone when one was available in the US. It went off basically every day around 8:30am PST when Adafruit would drop 100+ Pi4s. I’ve picked up two in the past week (one for my Voron printer and another for a RetroPi cabinet). They did sell out fairly fast.. in about 10 minutes or so.
- Sorry I have to laugh at this. If you have to write a script for it even if the script is easy there’s no way I can consider it “not hard”. Not hard is just being able buy it like anything else.
  I get what you’re saying though.
  
  I didn’t realize it would be so easy when I wrote the script. Knowing what I know now I’d just check adafruit every couple minutes starting a bit before 8:30am PST.
  
  Hard for a "layperson", maybe. But IMHO for someone interested in self-hosting this probably should not be a hard problem to solve, or at least a decent "warmup exercise" to see if you'd like it.
  I say this because you don't even need to write the script yourself, there are plenty of preexisting applications that can be configured to notify you of updates to an RSS feed.
  I'm sure I could whip that up in changedetection.io or Node-RED pretty quickly, for example.
  I don't use a dedicated RSS feed reader app, but I'd also be somewhat surprised if there isn't one that supports some form of push notifications.
- The thing is that right now it's not worth it to buy a raspberry pi if you want to selfhost. It is 4 years old at this point but it cost 50% more than when it was released.

9 comments