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!!

  • Cyber PingU English
    10•9 months ago

    @[email protected] I’m in your situation. At the moment on my RPI 5 I’m hosting (via docker) the followings:

    • lemmy
    • mastodon
    • gotosocial
    • peertube
    • pixelfed
    • grav CMS
    • matrix homeserver (synapse)
    • gitea
    • nextcloud And outside docker
    • teleport cluster
    • nginx for some reverse proxy
    • minecraft java 1.20.1 server

    For the sake of clarity, here is my docker ps -a | wc -l

    cyberpingu@vega:~ $ docker ps -a | wc -l
36
cyberpingu@vega:~ $

    Almost everything is behind a reverse proxy (on another machine, a rpi4 with KVM) with an argo tunnel. And again

    top - 10:38:34 up 9 days, 14:33, 14 users,  load average: 1.06, 0.50, 0.34
Tasks: 544 total,   1 running, 543 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu0  :  2.0 us,  2.0 sy,  0.0 ni, 96.0 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st 
%Cpu1  :  1.3 us,  0.7 sy,  0.3 ni, 97.7 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st 
%Cpu2  :  2.6 us,  1.3 sy,  0.0 ni, 95.4 id,  0.3 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.3 si,  0.0 st 
%Cpu3  :  2.7 us,  0.7 sy,  0.0 ni, 96.0 id,  0.3 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.3 si,  0.0 st 
MiB Mem :   8053.5 total,    156.8 free,   5744.0 used,   2683.2 buff/cache     
MiB Swap:  16384.0 total,  11620.0 free,   4764.0 used.   2309.5 avail Mem

    So if the question is “Is it enough a RPI 5”? The answer is yes, it is enough (at least for moderate traffic OFC). If the question is “I have to buy hardware: is a RPI 5 the best choice?” the answer may vary depending on many things. As you’ve been told, if GPIO is not a problem, maybe a minipc is better.