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!!
As someone that has only recently started selfhosting stuff, I can’t offer much advice. But having bought an RPi5, which runs most of my things, I’ll tell you this finding from my research. They’re awesome, but the SD cards don’t last long, so ideally you want to minimise the writes. I’m not sure a Matrix server allows you to do that. Though it absolutely can handle all of the above.
This is what scares me the most. Ideally, I want a whole SSD to store data. I really don’t want to lose any important data. I plan on hosting public services (like the services I’ve mentioned above) under my domain, so having a reliable drive would be really helpful.
General rule: if you have “important data” don’t go cheap. Get a real computer. Have backups. Test them.
Yeah. You can pretty much mitigate all of your concerns with an SSD. But I’ve never run anything public facing. So make sure you confirm that there’s people running said services on Pis before you pull the trigger.
You can use an SSD as a boot drive on the Pi. I have my Home Assistant Pi running off an SSD.