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!!

  • LifeBandit666English
    1•9 months ago

    I got a Dell Optiplex for £68 on eBay to replace my pi4b Home Assistant.

    It’s running Home Assistant plus a Windows machine Arr stack with Plex and transcoding, a music server, a NAS storage and Adguard at the moment and I still have ram to spare.

        • @[email protected]English
          1•9 months ago

          Ah bummer. I’ve been wanting to retire my mid tower in favor of one of the Optiplex micros that I have but wanted something that could hold the 9 HDDs currently inside of it that wasnt a $1300 NAS but haven’t found a good solution.

            • @[email protected]English
              1•9 months ago

              Unfortunately I’d need some sort of backplane with it to connect it to the micro PC. I have looked at DAS options but they seem pretty uncommon and mostly relegated to no-name Chinese manufacturers on Amazon which seems risky due to questionable quality.

              • LifeBandit666English
                1•9 months ago

                I’m not sure what a backplane is, but my HDDs are connected via usb3 cables with power chords. I’m sure there’s speed constraints but it’s what I’ve done.

                • @[email protected]English
                  2•9 months ago

                  A backplane is what provides the HDDs power and data connections. A DAS is basically the drive caddy you linked to earlier with built in internal connections for each drive that then connect to a PC via a single wire.

      • LifeBandit666English
        1•9 months ago

        Logitech Media Server aka Squeezebox. It works mostly on plugins. The server runs on almost anything and connects to a client software on a pi in my bedroom and 3 Google Home Minis I have dotted around my house.

        It’s a work in progress at the moment. I have it connected to YouTube and Spotify but I’m working on pulling all the music off my old iPod I have in the car, sorting it from the mess Apple made of the files and putting them on my NAS.

        Last night I was trying to get LMS to see that music. But alas I couldn’t work out how to mount a Samba share to the container so today I’m gonna be trying FTP instead.

        LMS is great but it takes a lot of tinkering to customise to what you want.