Hosting a website on a Raspberry Pi - Part 1: why bother?
My site runs on a 40€ computer in my apartment. This series is how: Arch, Docker, Tailscale and Cloudflare. First: why I did it.
Endo
This website - the one you're reading right now - runs on a Raspberry Pi sitting in my apartment. Not AWS. Not some VPS for 5€ a month. A Pi 4 with 8GB RAM and a USB SSD, in a corner, on my network.
Why would anyone do that?
A small VPS is 5€ a month. 60€ a year, forever. The Pi cost me 40€ once, and electricity is maybe 10€ a year. After less than a year it's cheaper than the VPS, and the Pi is mine - no provider deciding my VM is "underutilized" and deleting it.
But honestly? Money is the small part. The real reason: you learn things running your own box. On a VPS you get a pre-installed system and click around. On your own hardware you make every decision - which distro, how disks mount, what's exposed to the internet, what happens when it breaks. And it breaks. Every break taught me more than a tutorial ever did.
The stack, in four parts:
- Arch Linux ARM - lightweight, no bloat, you decide what's on it
- Docker - every service in a container, started from one file
- Tailscale - a private network, so I can reach my machines from anywhere
- Cloudflare - domain + tunnel, so this site is public without my router ever opening a port
One post per part, over the next weeks. Each one simple: what it is, why I chose it, how it's set up.
To be fair: this is not for everyone. Your internet goes down, your site goes down. A Pi is not redundant - no second datacenter taking over. And you will spend an evening on a problem that a VPS provider would have solved for you in a support ticket.
For me the trade is worth it. I wanted to own the whole thing.
Next part: why Arch Linux, of all things.