Hey! I’m trying to get into self hosting and was wondering what would be possible with a single Pi, at least until I can get more capable hardware.
The servies I’m interested in would be things like a pihole, music server, photos server, a few personal fediverse instances (mainly owncast), a small Matrix homeserver for my friends, etc, etc. Media server but that’s obviously way into the future I think.
While I don’t intend or think I can run all of this on one Pi, I just want to know how much is possible. I’m really thankful for any feedback I may get. My apologies for the noobness if I’m completely wrong about all of this.
One last thing, any recommendations on any other services I should try out as a beginner?
Edit: In hindsight, I really do I wish I asked about the ability of sharing these services with people and how that would affect the load and performance. One of my biggest goals is to have this used by family and close friends.
My main hesitation on running anything mission critical is the reliability of sd cards.
They are pretty great for anything that can be easily replaced imo. Thinking octopi, pihole, pivpn f.ex.
I started with a pi 4 and it worked really well!
Thanks, but I decided to go for a 1 liter PC with a 9th gen i7 instead. I can’t believe this post is 4 months old lol.
On my most active Pi 4B I run docker with: Bazarr Doplarr Foundry VTT Jacket Overseer Plex Portainer Radarr Sonarr Syncthing Transmission through VPN
You can do a lot with these little things
Edit: missed an r
The pi would be fine for a lightweight music server (ex. gonic), maybe a lightweight photo app and pihole.
Fedi software generally requires a decent machine, so it’s probably better to use something else; same for matrix.
As long as you learn, I would encourage you to start right now and see where it takes you. Maybe you discover that is enough and you save yourself the money for other hardware. Or maybe you realize you need a Low power NAS for Photos, a silent Intel NUC for media, a PI for pihole and a dedicated server with VMs for each instance of software you want run / toy.
I find that hosting photos server never worked for me. Is frustrating to wait for a gallery web page to load, browser has to download lots of thumbnails and many requests and latency + is hard to search recursively in nested folders. Is cheap to have a memory card on the phone and load them instantly and just put them on the NAS from time to time.
For Media I did use a Raspberry PI3, but I don’t like PIs as servers. They are slow and hot and I experienced some micro sdcard issues during power loss. One advantage is that they have HDMI CEC so you don’t need a separate remote if you plug it to your TV.
All this:
How do you ensure that your data (files, photos) is backed up when using Nextcloud? I’m very paranoid having all my files lost due to a drive failing.
Restic/Kopia/Borg are popular backup tools, set up a backup to another local drive, and also to online storage somewhere such as Wasabi S3, or Backblaze B2.
So can I just use a RPi that’s connected to 1-2 external HDDs/SSDs and use them as backup drives? Would I have to run them in a RAID configuration or something?
Yep, you don’t need to use RAID unless you want to.
Each project may publish minimum specs. Find what you and add them up. Fediverse instances can require several services and are the most complex thing on your list.
Thank you! The only thing I’d want to host is Owncast upon reflection, which I probably won’t be doing until I have a better setup than I do now.
If they don’t publish minimum specs, you can try running the services in a virtual machine on your laptop to see how much memory they use.
Owncast is very bandwidth heavy. If your net connection doesn’t have a high upload speed you are going to have problems with it.
