Raspberry Pi 4 now available in our Pi Cloud
Our PI 4 servers all wear the Power over Ethernet HAT to provide power and cooling to the CPU.
We’re now offering these in our Raspberry Pi Cloud starting from £7.50/month or 1.2p/hour.
Since the release of the Raspberry Pi 4 last year, it’s been an obvious addition to our Raspberry Pi cloud, but it’s taken us a little while to make it happen. Our Raspberry Pi Cloud relies on network boot in order to ensure that customers can’t brick or compromise servers and, at launch, the Pi 4 wasn’t able to network boot. We now have a stable replacement firmware with full PXE boot support.
The Pi 4 represents a significant upgrade over the Pi 3; it is over twice as fast, has four times the RAM and the network card runs at full gigabit speed. On a network-booted server this gives you much faster file access in addition to more bandwidth out to the internet. We’ve done considerable back-end work to support the Pi 4. We’ve implemented:
- New operating system images that work on the Pi 4 for 32 bit Raspberry Pi OS and Ubuntu.
- A significant file server upgrade for faster IO performance.
- Supporting the different PXE boot mode of the Pi 4 without impacting our Pi 3 support.
Ben Nuttall has been running some secret beta testing with his project Pi Wheels which builds Python packages for the Raspberry Pi. We’re grateful for his help.
Is it any good?
tl;dr – YES
We’ve historically used WordPress as a benchmarking tool, mostly because it’s representative of web applications in general and as a hosting company we manage a lot of those. So we put the Raspberry Pi 4 up against a Well Known Cloud Provider that offers ARM instances. We benchmarked against both first generation (a1) and second generation (m6g) instances.
Our test was rendering 10,000 pages from a default WordPress install at a concurrency level of 50.
| Raspberry Pi 4 | a1.large | m6g.medium | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spec | 4 cores @ 1.5Ghz 4GB RAM |
2 cores 4GB RAM |
1 core 4GB RAM |
| Monthly price | £8.63 | $45.35 (~ £36.09) |
$34.69 (~ £27.61) |
| Requests per second | 107 | 52 | 57 |
| Mean request time | 457ms | 978ms | 868ms |
| 99th percentile request time | 791ms | 1247ms | 1056ms |
In both cases the Pi 4 is approximately twice as fast at a quarter of the price.
Notes:
- Raspberry Pi 4 monthly price based on on-demand per-second pricing.
- USD to GBP conversion from Google on 17th June 2020