I recently bought a domain from Porkbun (thanks to all of the comments on this post!) and I want to self-host some services myself. I currently have a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ and I’m not quite sure if it can handle these things:
- A matrix homeserver
- A lemmy instance
- A website with static HTML pages
- Privacy-respecting frontends (Piped, Redlib etc.)
I am thinking about getting a maxed-out Raspberry Pi 5 with a whole 8 Gigabytes of RAM. Is it worth it? I need a machine that is quiet, doesn’t draw that much power and is overall pretty good for the money.
Edit: I bought this Mini PC instead of the Raspberry Pi 5. Thanks to all the comments!!
In my humble opinion the Pi 5 is very expensive for what you get. You just don’t buy the board, you also buy the fan (cooling), case, power supply and SSD + connection adapter. For more or less the same price you can get a refurbished Intel NUC with a i3, 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD. Or you can look for N100 at AliExpress. You will get the full blown experience and reliability + x86. And if you want to use Plex then you can make use of QuickSync for hardware encoding. I don’t understand why people bother with the Pi if they don’t need the GPIO. The extra power consumption of a NUC compared to the Pi 5 is minimal, in my case just 70 cents a month. Do yourself a big pleasure and get a NUC. The Pi is not the all in one cheap solution anymore it used to be. And x86 so no goofy community maintained as is ports to arm.
And you can upgrade a NUC with more RAM up to 32 GB if you pick a model which supports that amount.
My go to is a refurbished slim mini pc. Like a dell or HP for sub $100
I’ve got a BeeLink N100 system that’s just a bit bigger than a NUC, has two 2.5Gb LAN ports and came with a 512gb nvme drive. Works a treat as a Jellyfin server with TONS of processor and ram headroom. N100 is a great little chip, so long as you’re not expecting i5+ power.