A few months ago I decided to self-host everything for my software house instead of paying for cloud infrastructure. Here's what's running on a Raspberry Pi 4B (4GB) at home:
Astro static site + nginx Full mail stack (Postfix + Dovecot + Roundcube) in Docker MariaDB with automated backups GoAccess analytics with custom Python bot/human separation Dynamic IP blocklist generated at every deploy Certbot managed on a separate Orange Pi Zero 3 (HAProxy + SSL termination)
The Orange Pi Zero 3 as a dedicated HAProxy node was the best €25 I spent — SSL overhead completely offloaded from the Pi, all subdomains routed through one config, clean network separation between "what faces the internet" and "what runs the services." Storage: all boards boot from SSD via USB3. No SD cards in production. The ISP situation: Eolo wireless, 20Mbps down / 100Mbps upload. Yes, upload is 5x download. For a web server that's actually ideal. Real stress test — June 22, 2026 A post on r/italy hit 20k views in 24 hours. Numbers that day:
555 human visitors (vs ~180 daily average) 151 unique IPs 72.2% return rate 9.98 MB bandwidth 0 downtime 0 errors in the mail stack
PageSpeed from Google's infrastructure:
Desktop: Performance 100 / SEO 100 Mobile: Performance 97 / SEO 100
No CDN. No Cloudflare. No edge nodes. Just nginx on a Pi. The honest limitations:
Single point of failure — yes, if the Pi dies the site goes down Mail deliverability on residential ISP is hard (Brevo relay helps) No redundancy — we run backups, not replicas
All traffic data is live and public: stats.lake8.dev/geo.html Happy to answer questions on any part of the stack.
Hey Grazie for following up, appreciate it. Sounds even more impressive now that I understand it fully.
I was thinking about it after I posted and I suppose the fact that its complex is part of why the big corporations can benefit so much from our data. They have full control and a million services to host your site, manage your email and analyse your data, and all it takes is a two minute sign up and you are in. Sounds great for the basic user, which is most of the world, but the price you pay is that your data and privacy is effectively gone. They have a captive audience and we go running to them. Its a shame.
I suppose if self hosting was easy, many more people would be doing it. I still love the idea but i think its still a bit technical and that puts me off.
Again, appreciate the response and time taken to explain. I can almost feel feeling of satisfaction you must have, knowing that you are saving money, protecting your privacy and running part of your business in such an excellent way! Great work.
Ciao!
Ciao ropatrick! You nailed it perfectly. The big corporations made it incredibly easy — two minutes and you're in. But "free" and "easy" always has a price, and in this case it's your data and your independence. You're right that self-hosting is still too technical for most people. That's actually part of why I built lake8.dev — to make this kind of infrastructure more accessible for small businesses, at least in the manufacturing sector. And yes — that feeling of satisfaction is very real. Every time the server handles real traffic from my living room, it feels like a small personal victory against the cloud monopoly. 😄 Grazie for the kind words — and for actually reading and understanding the post!