There are a lot of reasons not to give them your money. They’re assholes to the maker community and they openly talk shit on a lot of their customer base. That’s beside the point, though, really.
It’s just not a spectacular option for hosting. In order to get a Rpi competitive with even the shittiest laptop from 7 years ago, you’re going to end up spending more than you would spend on a decent laptop from 7 years ago.
If it is a computer that turns on, it will likely function orders of magnitude better than an Rpi and won’t bind you to ARM architecture. My entire hosting setup was pulled out of a recycling pile for free. Install ubuntu/ubuntu server and enjoy yourself.
If you intend on spending any amount of money on this hobby, I cannot express enough how much I recommend against any of that money going toward a Raspberry Pi.
EDIT: A lot of you seem to be reading this as “Raspberry Pis are all nonfunctional” and getting mad about it. Don’t do that.
Edit 2: Good to see that all the stupid parts of reddit made it here
I went from 1 to 11 computers running 24/7 and haven’t seen a notable increase in power costs in the last year
That’s not very telling without more data. Most x86 laptops consume 10W idle, x86 desktop PCs 50W idle. Double or triple that for moderate usage.
RPis? 5W max.
It’s not only about electricity costs, it’s also about heat dissipated in your room, fan noise and more generally waste.
Two of them are thinkservers, three of them are thinkcentres, and the rest are optiplex workstations.
I’m mildly aligned with your main point OP. Rpi’s have a place and are amazing at many things, but over sold on lots of ‘server’ usages. For the typical homelabber, it’s a hobby so not a big deal that this hardware they likely already have (Rpi) isn’t the best.
However, this point about energy usage means you have either a large energy bill and can’t see the margin increase OR those 11 systems are mostly idle and you simply don’t need all of them running.