I’ll be honest. I set up web hosting on a Raspberry Pi because I was curious and a little stubborn. I wanted my site under my roof, not “somewhere out there.” You know what? It worked. It still works. But it’s not a magic trick. It’s more like a careful kitchen recipe—simple, but easy to mess up if you rush.
Why I Tried It
I write and post photos. Nothing huge. No store. No wild traffic. Paying for a big server felt silly. I had a Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB) on my shelf, a spare 256GB SSD, and a proper power supply (5V, 3A). It sat by my router like a tiny space heater with a green light. My cat liked the warm spot. That helped my mood on long nights.
If you want a solid, step-by-step walkthrough before you dive in, the step-by-step tutorial from Tom's Hardware lays out the essentials clearly.
My Setup (Plain Talk Version)
- Raspberry Pi 4, 4GB RAM, booting from a USB SSD (faster and safer than a microSD card)
- Raspberry Pi OS Lite
- Nginx as the web server (it sends pages to folks)
- Certbot for HTTPS (Let’s Encrypt auto-renewal)
- DuckDNS for a free domain that updates when my home IP changes
- UFW firewall and Fail2ban to block bad login tries
- Router port forwarding for 80 and 443
- Later, Cloudflare Tunnel when my ISP put me behind CGNAT and broke my ports
For another perspective, you can skim this helpful Instructables guide that walks through a similar Raspberry Pi web-hosting build.
I started with a static site built with Hugo. Then I tested a tiny Flask app. Then, because I like pain, I tried WordPress in Docker. WordPress worked, but I had to tune it with MariaDB and a small Redis cache. Otherwise it felt like walking through syrup.
Real Things I Hosted
- My personal blog with Hugo. Page loads were fast—about 200–400 ms on my home network, 1–1.5 seconds for friends far away.
- A small photo gallery for family events. Thumbnails were okay; full-size RAWs were not okay. I learned to compress images before uploading.
- A Flask “wish list” app for my nieces at Christmas. It got 12 users. They broke nothing. Big win.
Even toy projects stretch a Pi in useful ways. I briefly considered testing a lightweight dating-app prototype; before writing any code, I dove into this concise yet thorough Happn review to understand how real-world location-based matching works and what kinds of database calls and latency budgets such features demand, giving me practical benchmarks for my own experiments. To gauge what a hyper-local dating or classifieds site might throw at my little server, I also browsed the Backpage Princeton board, which offers real-time insights into posting frequency and evening traffic spikes—perfect data for sizing a Raspberry Pi before you ship any code.
What Made Me Smile
- Power draw was tiny. My meter showed about 3–6 watts. That’s like a night light. My bill barely noticed. Maybe a buck a month.
- It’s quiet. My fan runs slow. No high-pitched whine. My living room stayed calm.
- I controlled everything. I could tweak Nginx rules, add headers, and block noisy bots with Fail2ban. Felt like my own little shop.
- It stayed up. With a cheap UPS and a power bank, the Pi lasted 2 hours during a winter outage. I still served pages while the neighborhood went dark. I felt a bit smug, I won’t lie.
What Made Me Groan
- MicroSD cards wear out. My first one died after 4 months. I moved to an SSD and didn’t look back.
- WordPress was needy. Without Redis and some Nginx caching, it dragged. After a plugin update, my 502 errors taught me patience.
- Security patches matter. I set a weekly cron for apt updates and Nginx reloads. I still checked things by hand on Sundays with coffee.
- ISP weirdness. Port forwarding worked until my ISP shoved me behind CGNAT. I swapped to Cloudflare Tunnel. It fixed things, but added another moving part. (If you’d rather dodge tunnels and go the cleaner route, check out my hands-on review of a dedicated IP hosting plan.)
- Spikes hurt. My post got shared on a local tech Slack. Traffic jumped to maybe 300 people at once. The Pi gasped. CPU hit 90%. Pages still loaded, but slow. Not fun.
Numbers That Help
- Cost: My used Pi 4 (4GB) was around $80. SSD was $25. Case and fan were $10. Power supply was $10. Not free, but cheaper than a year of a big plan.
- Speed: Static pages felt quick. WordPress felt fine up to about 8–10k visits per month. Beyond that, caching was key.
- Heat: With a cheap heat sink and a tiny fan, I saw 45–60°C. No throttling.
- Backups: Nightly rsync from the Pi to my old Synology. Weekly tar of WordPress database. I tested restores twice. Both times worked, which felt like breathing again.
Little Gotchas I Hit (And Fixed)
- Let’s Encrypt renewals failed once because my router changed the NAT loopback setting. I added a simple HTTP-01 location in Nginx and watched logs more often.
- Nginx config broke after an update—my fault. I added a /etc/nginx/sites-available/default.backup file, and a quick nginx -t test before reloads. Saved me some sweat.
- Bots hammered my /wp-login.php. I renamed the login path, set rate limits in Nginx, and let Fail2ban swing the bat. Quiet since.
A Short Detour: Static vs Dynamic
Static sites on a Pi feel like riding a bike on a flat road. Easy, smooth, and kind of joyful. WordPress feels like the same bike, but you’re pulling a small wagon. You can do it. You just need steady legs and a bit of tuning.
Tips I Wish I Knew on Day One
- Start with static. Hugo or Jekyll. Learn the ropes. Then try apps.
- Use an SSD. MicroSD cards will break your heart.
- Set up a UPS. Even a small one. It prevents file system tears during power flickers.
- Keep logs short. Use logrotate and drop old logs. Saves space.
- Cache early. Nginx fastcgi_cache or a simple reverse proxy cache helps more than you think.
- Test your restore. Don’t just back up. Pretend your Pi died and bring it back on a spare drive.
Who Should Try This
- Tinkerers. Students. Hobby folks. Anyone who likes to learn by doing.
- Small blogs, portfolios, and family sites.
- Makers who want to show a live demo app to a class or a meetup.
Who should skip it? If you run a store, need strict uptime, or fear Linux, I’d pick a cheap VPS instead. Five bucks a month saves time and gray hair. If you're managing bigger frameworks like Rails and want to see how other hosts handle it, read about what actually worked across eight different providers. If you'd rather offload the maintenance entirely, a managed VPS from WebSpaceHost lets you click once and be live without touching a terminal.
My Verdict
Hosting on a Raspberry Pi made me a better admin and a calmer user. It’s cheap, quiet, and kind of charming. Is it perfect? Nope. You trade comfort for control. But if you’re patient, and you set sane limits, it feels great.
Would I run a big site on it? No. Would I run my blog, a tiny app, and a family gallery? I already do.
Here’s the thing: the Pi won’t do the work for you. But it will meet you halfway. And on a slow Sunday, with logs clean and pages humming, that feels more than fair.