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.
Ah, yeah, we don’t like AI here.
Ciao! I’m Italian — my English is not exactly my strongest skill. But if AI-assisted translation bothers you, I can always switch to Google Translate 😊 Hope that’s reassuring enough.
Yeah Google translate preserves a lot more of your communication style. AI overuses so many phrases it can get annoying reading something that was processed through it.
Ciao! Fair enough. Though 200 people seemed to understand my AI-assisted English just fine — maybe the issue isn’t the language. 😄
To re-state, it’s not a problem of understanding or the language, it’s a problem with overused, bland, and repetitive language and phrasing. It’s not fun to read even if you can understand it perfectly.
Just because 200 people understood your post doesn’t mean it isn’t annoying to read. And it’s a super simple thing to fix - don’t use AI to rewrite your post and just use a normal translator instead, which won’t inject bland and repetitive phrases and structures.
You’re right, and that’s a fair criticism. I’ll use a plain translator next time. Thanks for pushing back on it.
Ah, yeah, we don’t like Google here either.
The Lemmy council approves
Honored. 🙏