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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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.
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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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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.
My main hesitation on running anything mission critical is the reliability of sd cards.
They are pretty great for anything that can be easily replaced imo. Thinking octopi, pihole, pivpn f.ex.
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.
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
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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I started my selfhosted journey with my RPi4 4G and a 4TB external HDD, currently I’am running: jellyfin, *arr stack and syncthing for obsidian. It works great for direct playing media. Also got to learn a lot creating a NFS/samba server, python, docker/podman.
it will get you started if it does not run very well try another thing, have fun!
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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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.
