There are a lot of reasons not to give them your money. They’re assholes to the maker community and they openly talk shit on a lot of their customer base. That’s beside the point, though, really.
It’s just not a spectacular option for hosting. In order to get a Rpi competitive with even the shittiest laptop from 7 years ago, you’re going to end up spending more than you would spend on a decent laptop from 7 years ago.
If it is a computer that turns on, it will likely function orders of magnitude better than an Rpi and won’t bind you to ARM architecture. My entire hosting setup was pulled out of a recycling pile for free. Install ubuntu/ubuntu server and enjoy yourself.
If you intend on spending any amount of money on this hobby, I cannot express enough how much I recommend against any of that money going toward a Raspberry Pi.
EDIT: A lot of you seem to be reading this as “Raspberry Pis are all nonfunctional” and getting mad about it. Don’t do that.
Edit 2: Good to see that all the stupid parts of reddit made it here
If I need something more powerful for stuff like my Minecraft server I use an old laptop running Fedora, but my pi 4 works great as a super low profile, low power, stable http and ssh server.
What’s this stuff about the pi foundation being assholes though, can someone fill me in?
Im guessing it’s this: https://www.dexerto.com/tech/raspberry-pis-latest-hire-is-an-ex-cop-who-built-surveillance-devices-2009036/
Their PR and social media managers are pretty shit honestly. But I can’t say for the other founders, or if this applies to the the Raspberry Pi foundation itself.
If this was the reason for OPs claims about the foundation I really would rather they elaborate rather than the rest of us guess what they’re talking about.
My raspberrypi works great as a backup git server, as long as it doesn’t fall off my table and get stepped on or rolled over by my chair. I also host a few static webpages on it for cooking recipes.
It actually has better uptime than my desktop, which I occasionally boot into windows when I (rarely!) encounter a steam game that doesn’t work well on Linux.
It does not work well as a DLNA server though, though it seems to manage lower resolution videos okay. I think I tried both tried reading videos from the SD card, and a USB external hard drive.
I have mine in a closet so I don’t have that issue where it might fall on the floor and get destroyed.
It has significantly better uptime then my PC since I main windows on it (windows gives me more fps in games and I don’t wanna dual boot) and I restart right away whenever there’s an update