I'm a big fan of the tiny Raspberry Pi computer. I have several, being used for a variety of projects and internal home servers.
Many moons ago, I noted a company in Austria was offering to co-locate any Raspberry Pi for free. Who wouldn't want free bandwidth and hosting for life, if only on a tiny card-sized computer?
As quick as I could, I signed up and got email instructions for configuration expectations, and shipping instructions. I dropped my tiny configured Raspberry Pi (and USB stick and SD Boot and a short USB Power Cord) in the mail (with customs forms!) on Nov. 14th. I pre-configured a sub-domain to be pointed to the already-assigned IP address, so I could simply browse the URL daily until it should come up on it's own (assuming I configured it right...!) Here's the live URL (of a boring landing page):
http://work.undr.com
It took over 2 months to arrive through customs and be installed on the network, so don't expect a fast install. Once it's up and running, all other management can be via the terminal, including adding hosts and services that have not been invented yet!
Raspberry Pi Server Costs
- $42 for board with shipping (512mb one!)
- $20 32gb USB
- $12 8gb SD
- $3 heatsinks (assuming 100% uptime in a hot server room)
- $2 cable USB-A to MicroUSB (short)
So for about $80 in hardware costs gets me free high-speed co-location of my Raspberry Pi computer, that has 40 GB of local storage to host tons of content.
Here's my instructions from setting it up ahead of time. It required that I double-check everything, hard-code the destination IP address (and IP6), and ship it off! It's online, linked, and DNS managed, acting as web server, PPTP VPN endpoint (for secure torrenting at home), and European-based micro-CDN for other projects.