Why doesn't it make sense? After 6 months your Rpi4 will be costing less than the VPS. Plus you get the fun of actually doing it.

P.S. Getting weird RPi errors because of power supply makes you appreciate the value proposition of a good VPS :p

> Why doesn't it make sense? After 6 months your Rpi4 will be costing less than the VPS. Plus you get the fun of actually doing it.

It doesn't make sense because the Raspberry Pi will not be able to serve traffic that one time when your post hits top of HN, which is the one time you really need your hosting plan to work. Yes, it can serve traffic that 99% of time when almost nobody visits your website, but if we look at % of requests served over the timespan of a year, we will see that the website was down for like 95% of users because of that 1 day of downtime.

> After 6 months your Rpi4 will be costing less than the VPS.

No, $10 per year, not per month. That means the rPi payback is 5-6 years, and for inferior hardware and bandwidth.

You and I clearly have different expectations for "a decent VPS"...

(I have a "One time cost access forever!" VPS, which varies me $9/year "maintenance fees", which I'm happy enough with for the money, but it's definitely "Useful for the price" rather than "decent".)

CloudAtCost is not a good reference for cheap VPS, they were never cheap and that maintenance fee make it even worse. Their performance is abysmal too, but that could have changed since the time I used them.

If you want some good cheap VPS, go check on https://www.lowendtalk.com/ you will find plenty of good ones there. I would suggest to pay a bit more and go with BuyVM, at 20$ per year for their 512 MB offering, but you could definitely get some cheaper just as good somewhere else.

Have a look at some of the providers I mention below. I’m not sure who you’re referring to above, but as with all things, it’s a spectrum. Plenty of garbage at that price point, but also some gems.

BuyVM, RamNode, FDC, Virmach (probably in that order).

Only if power is free

and bandwidth. and physical space, and the ability to stay isolated from physical conditions like floods (natural or plumbing-related) or power outages caused by somebody trying to plug in a kettle.

running a commercial VPS in a datacenter has a ton of advantages, but i'm guessing that the guy with a footer like this doesn't really care about them. running your website off a raspi in your living room is cool, wheher it's the most practical solution or not doesn't really matter.

I almost hate myself for writing this - but any given AWS AZ has had more outages/ performance degradations/service interuptions over the past ~5years than my home internet/electricity... and with an unmetered connection with a 200mbps+ uplink, how much more do I really need for a personal page?

Maybe a raspberry pi behind my sofa isn't so stupid?

Of course you could use multi-cloud/multi-azs, but do you really WANT to for a personal website?

Maybe I'm just unlucky, but I live in a Canadian city with pretty stable internet and since I moved 6mo ago (we won't count moving-related downtime) I've had at least a 1hr power outage and 3hrs of internet-related downtime.

I can't remember the last time my little nano server in US-West-2 has been down.

Properly cached, a single core on a low end VPS should be able to carry some serious weight.

But yeah, I agree. This is static content, and should be hosted on any of the gazillion free tier CDNs. But then you don’t get that warm fuzzy feeling of watching the rPi behind your couch melt into the floor.