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.
I like posts like this (certainly the spiffy world map looks like you are in a movie!), and I like the self hosting idea, but here’s the issue I see with self hosting stuff…
Its so complex. To me its bordering on inaccessible for the regular user. What you have described is very technical, and I see this all the time in the self host section; very cool looking dash, doing cool stuff, but then the description is like its literally in a different language. I’m usually lost before I have read three lines.
In your post, I’m actually not even sure what you have built. Mail server? Website? I’m fairly techie but I find it hard to understand. Is “software house” your business?
Its great and I commend your work, but its mind boggling and my overarching feeling when I see these posts is usually: “damn, way too complex, I wouldn’t know where to start”.
Thanks for the post however and for taking the time to document and answer questions. 👍🏼
You’re completely right, and thank you for saying it directly. Let me try again in plain English: I run a small software company from home. Instead of paying €50-100/month for hosting, email, and analytics services, I built everything on a €60 Raspberry Pi computer sitting next to my router. What’s actually running on it:
The website you’re reading about (like any website, just hosted at home instead of on AWS) Email — when someone writes to info@lake8.dev, it lands on that Pi Analytics — that world map showing where visitors come from
That’s it. Three things, one small computer, zero monthly fees. There’s also a green angle that rarely gets mentioned: the entire setup draws around 3-4W idle — less than a LED light bulb. A data center rack serving the same traffic would consume orders of magnitude more. Self-hosting at this scale isn’t just cheaper, it’s genuinely lighter on the planet. The complexity you’re seeing is real — it took months to set up and I have 20+ years of experience. I’m not going to pretend it’s for everyone. It isn’t. But that’s also why I built Lagotto BI — our actual product — which does the opposite: takes complex business data and makes it readable for people who just want to understand their business, not manage servers. So yes, “software house” is my small business. The Pi is just how I run the infrastructure behind it without paying cloud prices forever. Thanks for the honest feedback — it’s genuinely useful. thk :-)