SD Cards Do Not Like Crappy Power
I run my business website off of a raspberry pi. I had hosted in the cloud for years but decided to shift it to the home. I've been paying for a static IP for many years and well, why not?
I do have several things going against me.
- Power
- Power is very expensive
- Several power outages a month
- Very poor power. Constant clicks and power spikes. Hard to hit 115V.
- Hurricanes - When Irma hit we had no power for 90 days.
- SD Cards do not like crappy power
- Computer equipment does not like crappy power
- Hit and miss with the cable.
- Speeds fluctuate a lot but not really an issue.
- Due to the power outages sometimes the cable network runs out of fuel. I have starlink for.a backup but haven't spend enough time figuring out how to combine the IPV6 address with Cloudflare to serve the site on IPV4.
- High season is in the winter and the cable internet really degrades from all the tourists.
Even with all that I figured why not. This morning I had to do another FSCK on the sdcard. I am sure it was from the latest power outage. While I do use battery backups and surge protectors they don't do the greatest job. In this instance the PI is being ran from my POE+ Switch which is actually on a transfer switch. When the power goes out it switches to a pure sine inverter connected to a deep cycle marine battery. I have surge protector on it but I can't run another battery backup in-between.
Overall, I have ran a few FSCK to fix the sd card and the original sd card was a no-name brand that did not last. Either way when I compare to hosting it on AWS the PI has paid for itself. I really want to move some more sites over but I think I need to get some solar+battery installed before I tempt it.
My main "server" or in other words my old intel nuc that acts as a server appears to have a failing NIC. I was thinking I would upgrade that and then put proxmox on it. I already use several docker containers on it. If I do that then I feel like I do not know what I should use the PI for? It's a PI4 and I have PI5 sitting unused. I had to downgrade to a 8 port POE switch after my 24 port died. I got it replaced but I don't want to install it until I am fully moved over to solar+battery.