Fun fact, a raspberry pi does not have a built in Real Time Clock with its own battery, so it relies on network clocks to keep the time.

Another fun fact, the network module of the pi is actually connected to the USB bus, so there's some overhead as well as a throughput limitation.

Fun fact, the Pi does not have a power button, relying on software to shut down cleanly. If you lose access to the machine, it's not possible to avoid corrupted states on the disk.

Despite all of this, if you want to self host some website, the raspberry pi is still an amazingly cost effective choice, from anywhere between 2 to 20000 monthly users, one pi will be overprovisioned. And you can even get an absolutely overkill redundant pi as a failover, but still a single pi can reach 365 days of uptime with no problem, and as long as you don't reboot or lose power or lose internet, you can achieve more than a couple of nines of reliability.

But if you are thinking of a third, much less a 10th raspberry pi, you are probably scaling the wrong way, way before you reach the point where a quantity matters ( a third machine), it becomes cost effective to upgrade the quality of your one or two machines.

On the embedded side it's the same story, these are great for prototyping, but you are not going to order 10k and sell them in production, maybe a small 100 test batch? But you will optimize and make your own PCB before a mass batch.

> the raspberry pi is still an amazingly cost effective choice

It's really not though. I've been a Pi user and fan since it was first announced, and I have dozens of them, so I'm not hating on RPi here; we did the maths some time back here on HN when something else Pi related came up.

If you go for a Pi5 with say 8GB RAM, by the time you factor in an SSD + HAT + PSU + Case + Cooler (+ maybe a uSD), you're actually already in mini-PC price territory and you can get something much more capable and feature complete for about the same price, or for a few £ more, something significantly more capable, better CPU, iGPU, you'll get an RTC, proper networking, faster storage, more RAM, better cooling, etc, etc, and you won't be using much more electricity either.

I went this route myself and have figuratively and literally shelved a bunch of Pis by replacing them with a MiniPC.

My conclusion, for my own use, after a decade of RPi use, is that a cheap mini PC is the better option these days for hosting/services/server duty and Pis are better for making/tinkering/GPIO related stuff, even size isn't a winner for the Pi any more with the size of some of the mini-PCs on the market.

> Fun fact, a raspberry pi does not have a built in Real Time Clock with its own battery, so it relies on network clocks to keep the time.

> Another fun fact, the network module of the pi is actually connected to the USB bus, so there's some overhead as well as a throughput limitation.

> Fun fact, the Pi does not have a power button, relying on software to shut down cleanly. If you lose access to the machine, it's not possible to avoid corrupted states on the disk.

With all these caveats in mind, a raspberry pi seems to be an incredibly poor choice for distributed computing

The Pi 5 / CM5 / Pi 500 series does have a built-in RTC now, though most models require you to buy a separate RTC battery to plug into the RTC battery jack.