I got a raspberry Pi 4 a few Christmases ago, the one right before a global pandemic. This pandemic led to a shortage of PPE and a shortage of Pi’s. Since then, I’ve been toying with it, the Pi, as a small home-server on and off. The enthusiasm will grab me then when I think I’m on a roll the Pi goes skew-whiff. Printers and Pi’s hate me. I’ve ‘spun-up’ cloud servers many dozens of times for many short-term purposes.
In the last week, after I got reminded again that my Pi hates me, I made another server instance on Hetzner. I attached a domain to it, and after much research and indecision between CasaOS and Cosmos-Cloud, I’ve put the latter on it. I’ve lots of experience with Docker, so I think I’m allowed to take the lazy option to Docker container management.
I know it’s not self-hosting in the truest sense as it’s in the cloud, but it’s a decision I came to after reflection upon the pros and cons. Hosting in the home means electricity bills (depending on the hardware), and if the server is exposed to the internet there are security considerations. Off-prem in the cloud incurs a monthly rental fee, which can get quite high if you want/need increased resources. There’s lots of factors involved in both options. My server is only ~ £5 per month to rent.
I’ve got a few services running on my little server in the cloud now, and quite enjoying toying with it. I’m still looking at what else I can use it for, I might put Syncthing on it, but unsure as I already use Dropbox for off-site document backup. Looking also at Nextcloud, but that can be resource hungry.
It’s all good geeky fun. And Cosmos-Cloud is very nifty.
Current apps running:
- Filebrowser
- Pyload-ng
- FreshRSS
- Searx
I’ve to add a backup, probably Duplicati, but no hurry as I have nothing important on the server.
