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Free Raspberry Pi co-location in Sweden (fsdata.se)

62 points by draugadrotten ↗ HN
Swedish citizens are offered free- yes, free- co-location of a Raspberry Pi in fsdata's datacenter in Helsingborg, Sweden. 1Mbit/s, 100GB/month, 0.00 SEK per month. If you aren't a Swedish citizen, ask your facebook friends to co-locate the server for you. Don't miss out.

35 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 94.8 ms ] thread
dirktheman
Here in The Netherlands we have a similar initative by hosting company PCextreme: http://raspberrypicolocatie.nl/. 100 Mbit uplink and 500Gb data, not too shabby!
swinglock
It looks like they also accept international customers. Can't think of any reason not to use them instead unless you live within walking distance to fsdata!
Vivtek
Also, Dutch is easier to read than Swedish. So there's that!
vincentkriek
The only costs there are is that you will have to pay 7.50 if you want your raspberry back.
fakeer
How come? Any reason they are giving all this for free? I am not saying there some catch, but I just want to know.
dirktheman
Almost forgot: they also provide the power brick for you.
nodata
What does "500 GB Fair use" mean?
fakeer
Not sure but I think it ought to mean sth like "You are not supposed to use this bandwidth just for the sake of using up the quota, religiously".
wcchandler
Tjänsten är tillgänglig för privatpersoner och företag i Sverige.

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Roughly translated -- this is available to users and businesses in Sweden.

I'm not sure how they're going to deal with international folks.

unwind
The way I parse it (I'm Swedish), it explicitly says that they won't deal with international users for this. Isn't that pretty clear?
wcchandler
Thanks! :) Yep. Unfortunately, I already contacted them prior to seeing your reply.

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Edited to add this response via email:

"Im sorry but the service is not available for anyone outside of Sweden."

ryalfalpha
Could someone explain the economics driving this? Future up-selling?
Zirro
Exposure/free advertising in (primarily Swedish) tech-media, would be my guess. It may also encourage people to choose their services for other future hosting-related services.
mkup
People want to see if there's a market of tiny hardware hosting, and if yes, be first to develop necessary hosting technology (e.g. power supplies, relay boards for remote reboot, optimal RPi mounting on the server blades etc).
wcfields
It's a loss leader, host the Pi for free, then sell the reboots, SD card swaps, extra bandwidth, IP blocks....

Eventually upsell the customer to a full hosting package if they had used the Pi for an extremely cheap hobbiest/project/dev environment before going to a real server.

tbirdz
I think it's mostly a brand awareness/marketing type of trade off. You get your pi hosted for free, and then you are impressed with their uptime, service, whatever, and you are more likely to recommend your friends use this company's services, or get a paid vps or something from them yourself next time you need one. I took advantage of edis's offer of free pi colocation in the past, and since then I've also purchased a vps from them, and had several friends do that as well.
moron4hire
So why would you do this? The entire point of the RPi is not that it is a computer, but a computer that you can hack. It has GPIO pins directly hardwired into the processor. It has a JTAG interface prominently exposed. How are you going to be hacking at it in any interesting ways unique to the RPi if you don't have physical access to it?
klrr
Well, the stuff you say is why I bought it. But I don't have any time for it. So, this makes some use of it at least.
leoedin
I think some people bought it for its small footprint, low cost and ability to run Linux. I'm sure a large number of RasPis will never have their GPIO used. If they're sitting somewhere as a home theatre PC, or a file server, or as a home automation PC running stuff over USB, or as someone's desktop, are those uses less interesting?

Certainly not unique to the RPi, but then neither is using its GPIO. Maybe someone wants an always-on ARM internet server to test builds? The one-off cost of a raspberry pi is less than even the cheapest of VPSs for a year.

I don't think I'd do it, but I can see why you might.

moron4hire
Still, these are all excellent reasons to have one in physical reach. Co-locate? Is it even an efficient use of electricity and money over making a similarly performant VM sharded many times on a more performant system?
lutorm
Given that the cost is 0, it seems like a fairly efficient use of money for the end user.
moron4hire
so if you extend that thought a little further, what is the ulterior motive of the co-location company?
lucb1e
That's like hanging your smartphone in a datacenter. Kind of interesting.
shocks
I am Swedish, but I do not live in Sweden. Can I get one? :3
kzrdude
no, it's for people and companies in Sweden. It does not mention nationality.
astrodust
So basically if you have a Swedish resident friend you're good?
geon
Cool idea, but with 1 Mb/s I can as well run it from home. Even with my crappy dsl.
sweely
First of all, the company only deals with people living in Sweden.

Second of all, it's one of the worst web hosting companies we have here in Sweden.

I honestly would use a free web host of some kind instead of these guys. Seriously.

I wish you guys read Swedish and could read some reviews of these guys online. They outright suck and are experts at charging you for stuff you didn't know you were getting charged for.

Fuck FSData!