If you use the Pi as a server it's not an order of magnitude cheaper than a cheap NUC. An N100 "NUC" like a Beelink S12 costs $150 including 16GB of RAM and 256GB NVMe storage! They are really ridiculously cheap. And really low powered.
If you want to use a pi as a server you won't get away with a slow microSD that kills itself every year, you'll need to add a real SSD (USB or now finally PCIe with the 5), decent cooling and power and a case. You will be at that $150 easily and you won't even have 16GB RAM.
I used to mess with little pi servers all over the place too yes. But this was in the days that PCs were power hogs. There's better options now.
> If you use the Pi as a server it's not an order of magnitude cheaper than a cheap NUC
I use my $15 RPi Zero as a git server[1], and it is literally an order of a magnitude cheaper at current prices. I bought the one I have for $5 (it was a promo, but still. That's how cheap Raspberry Pi's can get).
> If you want to use a pi as a server you won't get away with a slow microSD that kills itself every year, you'll need to add a real SSD
You'll need a good power supply if your Pi is destroying your SD cards. I lost a few before I wised up, and it's been years aince I replaced the SD card
1. Also hosts wireguard, has a bunch of webcrawlers and coordinates secondary backups between NAS and the cloud. It may not host docker containers, but the Pi is solidly in the "server" category for me, while consuming less than 1 Watt.
> If you want to use a pi as a server you won't get away with a slow microSD that kills itself every year
That's not true at all. Pick one rated for the workload, eg A2 ("application" rating, optimized for random io) which can be had for < 15usd and you're not gonna run into issues.
If you want to use a pi as a server you won't get away with a slow microSD that kills itself every year, you'll need to add a real SSD (USB or now finally PCIe with the 5), decent cooling and power and a case. You will be at that $150 easily and you won't even have 16GB RAM.
I used to mess with little pi servers all over the place too yes. But this was in the days that PCs were power hogs. There's better options now.