Hosting a server on Pi 2 B possible?

[aidenpatrickPGH]

I'm interested in hosting a MTA SA server myself, ands I would like to know whether my Raspberry Pi 2 B can host it. I plan on limiting online players to 15 - 20 at a time. Is this possible? I also plan on installing ENB series and possibly converting texture mods such as Pinnacle of V.

If not, let me know, or recommend me a decent free VPS that would allow this. I don't want to spend much on hosting a MTA SA erver for myself and few others.

Thanks.

[Mr_Moose]

It is possible and you could get pretty good FPS on that as well, although let's list the pros and cons.

Pros:

• It has a 900Mhz Quad-Core processor which provides fair performance
  
• 1GB RAM will also be sufficient enough for a mtasa server as it's pretty optimized in that area
  
• One time hardware costs, it works as long as it works and it's a cheap choice for a server
  
• Low power consumption, yearly costs will be just a few dollars
  
• Full root access and control over your own hardware etc..

And now the cons, and there are many of them sadly. This is compared to a normal VPS or a cloud VPS, if the specific feature doesn't matters for you then you can safely ignore that from the cons list, I'll just list everything that comes into my mind here.

Cons:

• It has a 900Mhz Quad-Core processor, the mtasa server is single threaded (correct me if I'm wrong) so you'll just have 900Mhz on a single core to play with while most VPS solutions allow you to use up to 3-4GHz/vCore. A slow CPU could make your server laggy if you run badly optimized resources
  
• Bandwidth: you can't get away from this cost and you'll need some extra in order to run your server, note that anything else you do on that network will affect your players latency, if you download a file you'll overload your bandwidth causing your players to get timeouts, there's no ddos protection on a home network and you'll lose your connection on all your devices in case of a ddos attack.
  
• Power: although the power consumption is low there's no backup batteries if you loose the power and your raspberry pi might get damaged or corrupt it's SD card if it loose the power in the middle of something
  
• Not sure if mtasa has been compiled for the ARM CPU architecture yet, you may have to compile it yourself or it might not be possible to run it at all.
  
• No scaling options, if your server get's popular or lacks of players you'll always be there with your raspberry pi without possibilities to upgrade and support more players and if you lacks of players you may wanna find a different usage area for it.
  
• No support, if something happens you need to be on spot and solve the problem manually 24/7 if you plan to even get close to 100% up-time which you'll never reach.
  
• Storage: an SD card formatted to Fat32 will always be slower than most hard drives and nearly all ssd drives, not just in read and write but also in access time. Slow access times will be noticed by your players as lag. This occurs even on a SD card 16-32GB size in the $30 class.
  
• Safety: you'll need to find a safe place to store it at, the average temperature is 40-50 degrees Celsius, and most important the charger needs to be a good one (at least 2A). You may have heard all the stories about burning mobile chargers, that's what you'll have to use instead of a normal PSU. Although if you have an old PC nearby you could get your power from one of it's USB ports, even when it's turned off.

And that's it for now, consider all that and decide what's best for you. If you change your mind and decide to use a VPS instead here's my two favorites starting at $5/month/vps: www.digitalocean.com and www.vultr.com both with rebate codes at $10 and $7 respectively. Good luck.