I recently heard of Picolocation and sent them my Raspberry Pi to host in their Aberdeen data centre. I knew this was a somewhat risky move and could backfire. Unfortunately it did and so here is what happened.
For starters it looks like my SD card got damaged in transit. Unfortunately the card was in it’s reader and that got damaged too :(. The Pi is no longer stable and so not much use anymore.
Picolocation seems to be run by a very nice guy called Philip and he is a pleasure to deal with. Unfortunately, there appears to be a degree of deliberate deception involved. Firstly, their Aberdeen data centre appears to be at a residential address. Your Pi will have to be behind NAT because they only have one IP and you will have to use their reverse proxy to serve out anything. Second, they are allegedly on an EE business line but the their dynamic IP seems to imply otherwise.
So overall not a great experince and my advice to others is: watch out; you don’t get something for nothing. My advice to Philip is to stop hiding things because his operation would be perfectly legitimate for some use cases if he wasn’t being so shady.
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