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
What if I care about power draw? Should I go for alternatives? BananaPi, OrangePi and so on?
If you need reallllly low draw like for battery powered devices then a pi could be the right choice. But x86 low power mobile/laptop CPUs in the last 5 years or so can get really close to a pi for power usage.
I have 2 systems with passively cooled i3-7100u CPUs and they idle at like 2W of power draw each.
A lot more expensive tho. Eh, I use my Pi only for Syncthing anyways.
That depends, I paid around $70 each IIRC. So at the original $35 price the Pi was cheaper, but it seems like they all go for $50+ now.
They’re more expensive, but check out ODroid H3+. Very low power consumption and great options for storage with pcie m.2 and on board SATA, and RAM slots.