One big reason why not to buy a Rqspberry Pi for Self Hosting is the price. If you want to run more heavy services (like jellyfin can be), you need the Pis with 8GB of RAM. Though those where already expensive before the sharp rise is RAM pricing. When you include a fitting power supply and a small cooler with fan (so that you don’t run into thermal throttle fast) you are probably already at like 110€ at least. For that money you can also get a used mini PC (those that companies use for their employees), that already has more power and offers better upgradebility (RAM, storage). Also for some services you might run into the problem, there is no version build for ARM devices (though that happens very rarely nowadays).

Though with the RAM pricing problem every computing device gets more expensive. Just include such mini PCs into your comparison to make a good decision.

A lot of people saying ditch the Pi, but it’s fairly viable depending on what exactly you want from it, so long as you get one of the newer models with plenty of RAM. Simply streaming media is relatively manageable for a Pi. It will most likely run Navidrome okay, and Jellyfin will be okay if and only if media doesn’t need to be transcoded, and you MIGHT have issues with 4K, not sure. If you stream to something like a smart TV or Fire Stick, those can typically only handle certain video formats, so if your media isn’t that type, either the server transcodes it, which the probably Pi can’t do fast enough, or playback fails. Music typically doesn’t require transcoding, so that’s why I think Navidrome should be okay. Pi-Hole is manageable and is, after all, expressly designed to be run on a Pi. It can also be run on standard hardware, so while you can do it on a Pi, you don’t need one to use Pi-Hole.

Now, that said, two main concerns about a Pi. The first is that you’ll probably eventually want to host and do more, and you may run out of resources and wish you’d just gotten a cheap mini PC instead. The second is that you really should get an external HDD or something to store as much as you can on, preferably including the OS. An SD card just is not meant to handle the constant I/O that comes with being the main drive for a full computer. It’ll eventually fail, taking all the data on it with it. I think the best way to run off an external HDD has changed since I used a Pi, so some research recommended, but what I did before was flash the EXACT SAME image to the SD card and HDD, then delete the boot partition on the HDD, expand the data partition to fill the HDD, and delete the data partition off the SD card. If you use the exact same image for both, it at least used to be that the partitions keep the same UUID, so it boots from the SD card as normal, and when told to find the other partition by UUID, it finds it on the other drive and works just fine.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 13 acronyms.

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Do not buy a RPI for self hosting. Get a mini PC second hand. It is much much better. And to answer you question, yes you can host multiple services on a single server. Read about virtualization and start learning the ways of proxmox, also say goodbye to your loved ones :)))

I have like 30 different services running on the same machine.

That’s why you want to use some container solution, I use docker for simplicity.

Also raspberry pi is not great for self hosting. Any cheap x64 machine will be much more powerful for the same price, and have less compatibility issues.

Just get an oldish SFF or USFF office computer cheap somewhere. It’s generally much cheaper and allows for upgrades if ram/ssd prices ever come down. Also somewhat new Intel CPUs are quite good for transcoding.

Yes but you should buy 3 and cluster them

I would skip Jellyfin on the pi. Other than that, it’s all good.

So yourself a favor and skip the pi and look for an old server on marketplace (loud and electricity is expensive, but lots of cores) or a NUC if u want a couple servers (or multiple docker containers)

Yes yes you csn.

The old may was we would run these direct like an app on the pi.

People then came up with containers and isolated things a bit made them easy to share and configure. - dockers

Have a look for people with blogs about all the software they are running on their pi plenty of info on how.

Pi isnt the best at jellyfin server as it isnt the best at transcoding files but for direct playing without having to convert the format its enough.

Easily! My Pi runs PiHole and a print server and I’ll could probably run almost my entire stack in it if I wanted. Jellyfin would be the hardest due to transcoding CPU usage, but it’s probably ok for one stream at a time.

The other issue for me would be storage. Since I have a 32TB NAS I run everything that requires large storage on it, but a USB RAID attached to a Pi would probably work just fine.

The other issue is RAM. I rarely hit 8GB, but do use more than 4GB fairly regularly.

Define “server”:

If you mean any process that serves on the network well then of course you can.

If you mean multiple containerized stacks acting as a service then yes, you can do that too.

If you mean multiple operating systems, I’m not so sure but I can’t imagine that it’s impossible.

As other commenters have said yes you can run these depending on the Pi. Do note however if you need transcoding, A Pi is not recommended by jellyfin:

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-selection#potentially-problematic-hardware

Most Single Board Computers (SBC): Most SBCs (including the Raspberry Pi, especially the Raspberry Pi 5) are too slow to provide an acceptable Jellyfin experience as they often lack proper support for hardware acceleration. If you really want to run Jellyfin on an SBC, you may wish to consider models based on the following platforms: Rockchip RK3588 / RK3588S, Intel Core, Intel 12th gen N series

If you can run multiple applications, you can run multiple servers—a server is just an application with a network interface.

Depends on the Pi in terms of how much you can do, but yes.

I have a Pi 5, and I’m running Pi Hole, Nginx porxy manager, Jellyfin, Syncthing, Paperless NGX, and a full servarr stack (including Qbittorrent and a VPN). No issues; 4.6 gb out of 7.9gb ram in use, and no appreciable bottlenecks.

I would just caution that things like Jellyfin are a moveable feast - I am 1 user streaming content on my own to 1 device without issues at 4k. But more simultaneous users and if you start depending on transcoding your mileage may vary. So yes Jellyfin and other services will run fine, but any server can be put under pressure if it’s not adequate for the actual usage.