Hi there. I have a R-pi vs 2, and I'm wondering how well you think that would hold up for a basic blog site. It doesn't need to be super fancy, but I would like it to at least be a little nicer looking and just a little more complex than for example Ycombinator.
Is this worth while to do? I'm concerned about using a pi, because micro-sd cards seem to be notoriously bad for corrupting data in less than ideal power situations.
> I have a R-pi vs 2, and I'm wondering how well you think that would hold up for a basic blog site.
Whether it could survive a lot of pageloads, like when submitting to HN and it gets traction, 100% depends on the blog software.
It won't run Wordpress well because that software is ridiculously heavy, and I frankly don't have good examples of database-based blog software aside from something I wrote myself. Mine still does multiple mariadb queries per pageload, so it's not as though it's extremely lightweight, but page generation comes out to a few milliseconds on a laptop with a CPU from 2012 inside. This software would survive the HN homepage easily.
I would estimate that anything that can handle >10 requests per second will survive the HN homepage, but if you're on the edge of 10r/s then perhaps it might be slower during the busiest minutes. If you would use static page generation (like jekyll, though I'm personally not a fan of how jekyll works it's the most well-known example) then the pi will definitely survive serving those static pages easily.
> I would like it to at least be a little nicer looking
The looks don't make it heavier or less heavy. Having a few style rules applied to the page is a few extra bytes per pageload, but they're not going to make the difference between it working or it not working.
You can always plug in a spinning disk. I used an RPi Model A to stream HD video off an HDD for around a year and it worked just fine. Keep an image of your SSD in case it gets corrupted and you need to reinstall.
Okay, so forgive me if this is a dumb question, but I thought the R-pi 2 requires the OS to be on the micro-sd to boot and can't use USB or PCI adapter connected drives?
Yes, that’s true. What I was suggesting:
* put the OS on the sd card.
* Put all the data on an external drive that is more reliable.
* Take a snapshot image of the sd card when setup is complete. If your sd card is ever corrupted you can use the image to restore the server.
It's possible to keep just a bootloader on the SD card, and have everything else on USB storage, so if the SD fails the data is safe and you just need to set up the bootloader again.
Is this worth while to do? I'm concerned about using a pi, because micro-sd cards seem to be notoriously bad for corrupting data in less than ideal power situations.