Self hosting doesn't have to be hard or expensive!

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Kenvexity
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Joined: Wed May 27, 2026 5:04 am

Self hosting doesn't have to be hard or expensive!

Post by Kenvexity »

When I began frequenting the indie web, I always wanted my own website, and while there is absolutely no problem with neocities, or some of the other hosting sites, I wanted absolute power over my site, and the ability to install other software not related to my site.

To my luck, I had a Raspberry Pi 5 which I was not using, and I decided, it would be my home server. I needed a NAS for storage, as none of my devices had great storage, and the ability to host my site.

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My humble setup, the Pi 5 connected to my modem.

I connected a 1TB HDD to it, and now it has my NAS, and I use OpenMediaVault to manage everything NAS related on there, a very user friendly software, fully open source, with great documentation and tutorials. I also host my very own website, https://kenvexity.org on this Pi. I use a cloudflare domain, for 6 euros a year, and I get protections, and many other benefits. There are great tutorials on setting up a cloudflare website on a Raspberry Pi, I use the one from "Pi my Life up", which also works on non-pi computers, as I used the same tutorial on my older ThinkCentre server.

This Pi does pretty much everything I need it to, I dont actually use a lot of storage, so the 1 TB HDD was enough, I just wanted a universal storage that all my devices could access. It has a 128 GB SD card, though I might eventually replace it with an SSD, as I know SD cards aren't the most reliable.

All in all, all of this was incredibly easy to setup with the correct documentation, and I truly think many can replicate this setup here. About the price, you can always get a cheap old desktop from Facebook Marketplace or similar, as I got the Raspberry Pi before the insane price hikes...

I hope this might influence someone to self host their stuff! Thanks for reading
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