Honestly Raspberry Pis are pretty underpowered as hosts for more than a handful of super basic services, and given they consume 20-30w at minimum you’re easily getting into used office desktop territory where you can get a ton more performance right out of the gate.
The real value in the raspberry pi is in the GPIO and the cohesive ecosystem of accessories to plug into said GPIO. You can do so many cool automations and controls using just an RPi (especially if combined with something that can’t be accomplished more cheaply and easily with an ESP32) but as a server host they’re pretty crap in comparison to a decade old business PC off of eBay
Honestly Raspberry Pis are pretty underpowered as hosts for more than a handful of super basic services, and given they consume 20-30w at minimum you’re easily getting into used office desktop territory where you can get a ton more performance right out of the gate.
The real value in the raspberry pi is in the GPIO and the cohesive ecosystem of accessories to plug into said GPIO. You can do so many cool automations and controls using just an RPi (especially if combined with something that can’t be accomplished more cheaply and easily with an ESP32) but as a server host they’re pretty crap in comparison to a decade old business PC off of eBay
I’ve got 3x RPi 4/5 with external drives and other USB running ~10 containers at 4-6W each. How did you make them draw 20W?