My journey building out a local data center (Part 1)

Yes, I'm building out a very small data center here in Bedford New Hampshire. I wrote an article about trying to find a local web hosting provider and not finding a single one in New Hampshire. This was very worrisome seeing how the web server industry had consolidated to only a handful of big players.

The advantage of hosting in Bedford is local people can contact local businesses with little latency. Our server is only about 2 hops away. When big ISPs go down, anyone connected to our data center will still work.

I've already experimented with using very small Linux computers to run my website with phenomenal success. Given the technological advances in hardware and software, I can host a moderately complex website with a $35 Raspberry Pi using a mere 3 watts of power! Consider that I can run 100 Raspberry Pis and still use less power than a single modern server. Each Raspberry Pi can handle multiple websites and hundreds of users depending on the complexity and design. The Raspberry Pi can host .Net websites, PHP, Python, Nginx, NodeJS and more. So this platform is very flexible.

My plan

I'm going to try to obtain 4 Pis, to start. Raspberry Pis are very hard to buy right now, so this may not be so easy. I'll put them in a rack and network them to a load balancer.

My next blog will talk about the nominal cost of hosting various types of websites and the features I'll start out with.