Everyone who reads this website will know about the cost of living crisis – this is a global problem brought about by the combination of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the unfortunate situation in Ukraine at the present time.
For us in the UK, the costs of energy have skyrocketed in recent months, with our government permitting the energy companies to charge us all an extra £600 per year in electricity alone. Given I run servers, this isn’t particularly good news.
The cost of running the network infrastructure behind this blog is not insignificant – just the server alone runs me around £30-£40 per month just in power, and add onto that the £45 in connectivity costs. I don’t meter the power taken by the router, switch etc, so the total cost will be marginally higher.
Given the increases that have hit, I expect to see a 3x increase in power costs to run this blog on the current hardware – an unsustainable jump.
I’ve got a couple of Raspberry Pi’s floating around, at the moment uncommitted to any tasks, so I thought I’d use one of these. A Pi CM4 module in a support PCB with dual network links should so just fine. I ogirinally got this to build a Pi based router (what it was designed for) – nevermind!
I’m using the new 64-Bit version of Raspberry Pi OS, and a 128GB MicroSD card for storage, since this board doesn’t have an open PCIe lane for a NVMe drive.
A quick setup with Nginx, php-fpm & MariaDB & I’m in business! The site is now running on a Raspberry Pi! As a plus, everything does seem to be quicker than the old Apache setup too. I have for now dropped a few features of the site, just until I get a feel of how quick this new setup is going to be, but they should be back soon!
