Raspberry Pi
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Raspberry Pi is an inexpensive computer board popular among hobbyists, especially for self hosting, and was used by some IndieWeb community members.
Why
Why for self hosting
The Raspberry Pi is an excellent computer for self hosting small websites.
The Raspberry Pi can run in the background without interruption which means that it can act like any remote web server, except you own it and have to maintain the server.
Advantages:
- There is a lot of documentation on how to self-host a website using a Raspberry Pi
- Raspberry Pis are cheap (especially the Pi Zeros, which can cost as little as $5)
- If your Raspberry Pi breaks, replacing it is not a massive cost.
- Pis run on Linux by default so you can use tools like Nginx and Apache to host a website.
Disadvantages:
- Setting up a Pi involves some technical know-how.
- See also self hosting challenges
IndieWeb Examples
IndieWeb community members hosting their sites on a Raspberry Pi device!
- no current IndieWeb examples
Previous Examples
Jay Robinson
j4y_funabashi was hosting his site j4y.co on a Raspberry Pi since 2016-03-20 til sometime in 2017 apparently.
- 2016 Last functional version: https://web.archive.org/web/20161007200303/http://j4y.co/
- 2017 May: Images broken: https://web.archive.org/web/20170520215618/https://j4y.co/
- 2017 June: Possible domain loss: https://web.archive.org/web/20170612002523/http://j4y.co/
I was using my raspberry pi as a local version of my site anyway and I started wondering how easy it would be to use that instead of my hosting provider (who could turn evil / lose my data) After a bit of research I found that it would be relatively simple, all I had to do was:
- login to my router
- forward port 80
- point my domain at my external IP address.
So now all my data is stored on a pi in my house, which is periodically backed up to an external hard drive (also planning to backup offsite to s3) which feels great!
If anyone needs help setting this up for themselves I would be glad to help you figure it out (though I am certainly not an expert!)
capjamesg
capjamesg used to host a weather station on a Raspberry Pi. He used a Raspberry Pi Sense HAT to collect environmental data about his home office. This data is reported online using a Flask web server hosted with nginx.
Brainstorm
- Because Pis are based on a version of Debian, they can run a wide range of self-hosted programs. Self-hosted programs give you another level of data ownership.
See Also
- webhosting
- Homebrew Server Club
- DIY Web Server: Raspberry Pi + CloudFlare
- personal cloud
- https://www.donaldmcintosh.net/blog/homehostpi
- self hosting
- https://twitter.com/whitingdev/status/1472073505680211968
- "your task is to make a user-owned web that costs a maximum of $40 one time (if you need a raspberry pi in monitor mode).
I'll give you a hint, a wireless internet service provider cooperative doesn't need bitcoin to function.
so, WISP + cjdns IPv6 + certificate transparency +.." @whitingdev December 18, 2021
- "your task is to make a user-owned web that costs a maximum of $40 one time (if you need a raspberry pi in monitor mode).
- Use-case: Indie physical tracking detector: 2022-08-11 WIRED: This Anti-Tracking Tool Checks If You’re Being Followed / The Raspberry Pi-powered device can scan for phones around you. If it keeps spotting the same one, it’ll send you an alert.