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I am planning on doing an internet connected temperature monitor (among other data) at multiple locations. At two of the locations I want to use a Raspberry Pi to display the information. The information at all locations will be gathered by a network connected Arduino.

My question is, would it be smarter to store the data on a shared hosting provider, in say a MySQL database? Or store the data locally on the network at one of the locations' raspberry pi?

I do not think I want to bog down a raspberry pi too much with php and MySQL, but at the same time I know shared hosting is not the most reliable. I was also considering storing the information in a Google drive spreadsheet and use the API to gather the data.

I would like to keep costs down on this project so what would be the most reliable option/smartest solution?

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  • Not really an answer to your question, more of an alternative. Have you had a look at Nagios? It sounds like its got all the plugins for what you want to do, and more. However, I do see the fun in doing it yourself!
    – Impulss
    Feb 1, 2013 at 6:41
  • I want to make an in house solution.. that would surely take the fun out of it!
    – jason
    Feb 1, 2013 at 19:28

3 Answers 3

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Firstly regarding your concern about "Shared hosting not being all that reliable". I'm not sure what country your from, but who is to say that your internet connection to your Raspberry Pi is all that reliable. Shared hosting is pretty reliable, probably more than your internet connection.

Secondly it depends on what exactly you want control over. Storing the data on the Raspberry Pi is better as you'll have control over everything, you'll also then know how to setup PHP and MySQL on your Raspberry Pi. These will impact the RPi's performance, but much less than you probably think.

In terms of cost, the least would be to do everything on your RPi. But that depends on how long it takes for you to set everything up. Personally I'd do everything on the RPi itself, so that it is more a self-contained solution.

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  • I would agree, I don't think mysql/php would bog the Pi down very much at all.
    – kolin
    Feb 1, 2013 at 15:25
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Shared hosting is not that bad - their servers and infrastructure is much more reliable than your RPI or your internet connection are.

If you don't need the history of data and only want to display current figures - why not have your Arduinos UDP-broadcast temperature data or send it over to a message broker hosted on RPI and just display current figures on the screen. This approach enables you to plug and plug a data logging device into the network and log the data at any time without having to rebuild/change anything.

If you need the history, take a look at RDDtool, database targeting the sort of data you are wanting to manipulate. It provides integration means for different languages - whatever you find easier to code.

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Check out www.cosm.com - it has an API for storing statistical data and it's free.

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  • While this link may answer the question, it is better to include the essential parts of the answer here and provide the link for reference. Link-only answers can become invalid if the linked page changes.
    – Mark Booth
    Feb 7, 2013 at 0:58
  • I should have added this as a comment, rather than an answer. However, providing the link to cosm is sufficient as, without www.cosm.com being up, any details about the API or additional information about using Cosm (registering etc) would be irrelevant.
    – recantha
    Feb 7, 2013 at 8:41

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