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.

  • Cyber PingU @lemmy.cyberveins.euEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    @AlexPewMaster@lemmy.zip 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.

  • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.meEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    I’m running my Matrix and Lemmy on a VM smaller than that, so it should be fine. Just don’t run it off an SD card as the others have said, because that’s going to be a database heavy workload which means loads of writes to storage.

  • sabreW4K3@lazysoci.alEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • AlexPewMaster@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
      0·
      10 months ago

      but the SD cards don’t last long

      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.