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.
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Holy hell, thanks a ton! I think I’ll give it a shot then, but also look around a bit and see what else is available. This gets around the 100 dollar range when you factor in a case and some cables. Luckily I have quite a few spare ethernet cords laying around.
You can find a nice pi 4 bundle on ebay for ~100 USD instead of buying a marked up new one. I got a 4GB pi 4B, decent size SD card, and a case with a fan for $90 IIRC.
Also, Linus Tech Tips recently did a video on pi alternatives. There’s a bunch now that pi’s have gotten so popular.
No reason to transcode if you have the bandwidth I’ve found, just allow / force direct play / direct stream on all clients
Also I run RAID 1 USB HDDs and honestly they do fine with up to a few people at a time streaming
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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
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.
The Matrix server and multimedia stuff seems fine (I’d recommend finding one software that can manage as much of that as possible, like PLEX or Jellyfin), but with a Fediverse instance, IDK, if it gets enough traffic that could drag down your device.
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.
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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.
Fair bit (on a nanopi m4, pi has better ram and ends up being faster than the m4). I ran a matrix server (and a bunch of bridges) and syncthing on it with 4 drives. It wasn’t fast. But it worked. You could consider horizontal scaling for these services by adding more Pis. You can simplify (resource wise) the Pihole by setting up dnsmasq and have the servers it look up be ones that follow the adblock lists you want.
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.
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How is it bandwidth heavy? Can’t the streamer dictate the bitrate?
Sure, but you need to send to every viewer. It’s not like with Twitch where you send once to their servers and they distribute it to the viewers.
One of these will cost you about $50 - $70. Load it up with 32GB of ram and you’re running something more powerful and cheaper than a Pi.
That’s my set up and have over 20 containers running.
Did you intend for there to be a link to something? I don’t see what’s you’re talking about using.
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.
