Ask HN: Reliability of Raspberry Pi for production Django app

5 pointsgregvab2 comments

I am developing a django application for a business which will be used for storing client information as well as visit records. There are two users: the owner and his receptionist. A daily visit count estimate of 30 would be on the generous side. I am curious to know if this can be served reliably on a Raspbery Pi 4.

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Pis can be made relatively reliable, but it's extra effort (read-only or no SD card, making sure power supply is good, ...). For a business scenario, I'd consider a mini-PC instead: they're not that much more expensive than a Pi once you're done with all the parts, more reliable out of the box and easy to replace if needed in the future.

Performance-wise it should be fine given the expected workload. I'd suggest just using SQLite in this case instead of a dedicated DB server.

Your biggest concern here would be storage and backups. Considering the little amount of data as well as low volume of changes, I think a daily backup will be more than enough and can be done by just encrypting then emailing the SQLite DB file.

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