Raspberry Pi's are great little machines, at the right price point and for the correct use case.
however, the premiums they were selling for over the past few years made them a poor choice for noderunners. instead you could pick up a Dell Optiplex Mini or Intel NUC for a similar price, and use Proxmox to virtualise a whole bunch of VMs / containers on the same device.
for instance, i'm using an Intel NUC which runs:
- Pi-hole DNS container
- Network hardware management container
- Bitcoin node VM
- Usenet clients (SABnzbd, Sonarr, Radarr) VM
- Transmission BitTorrent VM
- Various VMs for testing
in doing so, i have been able to free up 2 switch ports, 2 GPO outlets and simplify management and backups.
Raspberry Pi's are great for embedded applications or as an energy efficient dedicated server, but i think the flexibility and learning opportunities available when going down the x86 route make micro PCs a better option for most.
hopefully the Raspberry Pi Foundation increase manufacturing capacity and prices remain reasonable moving forwards, but for the plebs spinning up a Bitcoin node, micro PCs are worth the investment.
