I don’t see a refutation or even disagreement with the claim in your comment. Are you saying that this is too obvious to restate?

The implied refutation of "You don't know what specific requirements people have" is that there will be people with specific requirements that a Pi/Mini PC obviously doesn't meet.

Like what?

Any type of redundancies.. Geo, power, network. There's a million possible reasons why someone can't just deploy on a pi and call it a day.

Do you need that? If a storm knocks my power out for a couple hours and my side project has an outage, that's fine.

This is side project, not typical web project. For a typical web project stability and safety of data are paramount.

I think you mean "critical business" not "typical web project", which is not critical to anything.

Granted, I'm sure the average engineer will be very relieved to find out they're paramount to production.

If you're making money off a project I suspect you're generally too far gone for advice. Then again I suppose you don't need it.

One Million Checkboxes seems like a candidate:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Million_Checkboxes

It looks like RPi should be able to handle that.

> You don't know what specific requirements people have

This is actually pretty apparent if you camp a web forum. People seem to either need a raspberry pi or a data center: this is the typical web-app vs mmorpg divide amongst possible computational fantasies people have. Questioning what motives people have is very sensible.

Not only that, people always assume that you need complicated dependencies if they use AWS and compare any of the other company's stack with their raspberry pi. They can use AWS lightsail just fine for $5 if they just need a VM.

If you just need a VM why not a plain EC2 instance? Why are you adding already lock-in to the secret sauce?

lightsail is just an EC2 instance plus storage. Its pretty much just a VPS. No extra locking. Its what I push people determined to use AWS because of the branding towards.

IMO if you're using plain EC2 alone you should not be using AWS anyway.

Go grab a similar server from Hetzner or something.

Lightsail is cheaper, but lacks additional enterprise-y features like VPC.

That's fair too, those $5 a month machines can also serve you well as long as you can limit bandwidth charges if you suddenly end up with a lot of traffic.

I might be biased since I posted the comment, but I don't think it's pointless :)

It's worth repeating, if only to raise awareness among devs that modern computers are _extremely_ fast. You can start a new one with commodity hardware and it will probably serve your needs for the lifetime of the project. If your project gets so popular/successful that you need more than a single machine, then I would hope by that point you know how to move it onto a cluster of machines, or into the cloud if the economics make sense.

I say "most web projects" because it's true - most web projects are simple CRUD apps in slightly different forms. Sure, there are some up-and-comers using AI to burn half a data center to produce fake comments and images for internet forums. Those won't run on a Pi or single mini PC. But people are making _so_ many web apps that will never see more than a few hundred or thousand users. Those don't need multi-instance load-balanced highly-available infinite-scaling systems to serve their users needs. That usually just adds cost and complexity until you're at a point where you _really_ need it.