Also, Raspberry Pi 4 (Model B) costs ~35 USD as a one-time cost, the 5 USD VM from DigitalOcean is per month. If you're planning to run something for longer than ~7 months, you'll save money (and get better CPU/IO [not network probably though] performance) by going with the Pi instead of DigitalOcean.
The SD card in the Raspberry has to be purchased + wears out pretty fast if you utilize it.
The VPS power bill is already paid with its price.
For the Raspberry you have to pay the power bill.
Here in Germany we now reach 40 Euro Cents/kWh.
5 Watts 24/7 are 17.52 Euro/Year
10 Watts 24/7 are 35.04 Euro/Year.
The Raspberry is somewhere between.
That is the reason why I replaced my Dell t30 Server with two Contabo VPS servers.
I also don't have to worry about my ISP screwing up my connection.
> The SD card in the Raspberry has to be purchased + wears out pretty fast if you utilize it.
Buy a high-endurance card or simply use external media if you have I/O heavy services you run on it.
> The VPS power bill is already paid with its price. For the Raspberry you have to pay the power bill.
True, but that cost is so small. Not sure if those German prices are accurate for most places, but where I live, it's nowhere near 0.40 EUR /kWh, so the cost of electricity per year is marginal at worst, unnoticeable at best.
> That is the reason why I replaced my Dell t30 Server with two Contabo VPS servers. I also don't have to worry about my ISP screwing up my connection.
Taking a look at Contabo (never seen them before), it seems their "Cloud VPS" is all virtual CPUs (not dedicated ones), so not really comparable.
That SD card quickly wearing out might be only relevant to Raspberrys before v4, because they could (try to) draw up to 15 W, while USB 2 could only deliver 2.5 or 7.5 W at best ?
