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A recent trend shows several data centers are offering professional hosting services for Raspberry Pis. What is this all about?
Colocation of Rasp Pi servers
Lead Image © ayelet Keshet, 123RF.com
One morning last February, a team from a Dutch hosting provider [1] came up with the idea of offering free hosting for Raspberry Pis. The team projected that there would be about 50 people who would take advantage of the offer. However, as news of the offer sped across the Internet, more and more people signed up. By the middle of April, the service provider found itself operating three server cabinets, each of which was filled with 150 Rasp Pis.
As illustrated in Figures 1 and 2, the unexpected response from Raspberry Pi users made it necessary for the team to rethink the provisional structures they had put in place. For several months now, the service provider has been using specially constructed racks. The racks in each cabinet hold 500 Pis. In the meantime, 2,000 people have now taken advantage of the hosting offer, and the provider has recently started charging new customers about US$ 4.25 per month for hosting a Pi. Now, service providers from Austria [2] and Sweden [3] are copying the idea.
Is It Desirable?
From a technology standpoint, offering colocation for Raspberry Pis does not make much sense. Therefore, this service could rightfully be viewed as a marketing tool for the host provider. Or, perhaps it can be seen as a project undertaken by the data center team to test what possibilities exist. End users who need to have a broadband connection for their Linux shell or a dynamic web presence can just as well rent a vServer for EUR 3 or about US$ 4.10 per month.
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