Holding up quite well despite HN frontpage. I love what a bit of caching can do.
EDIT: appears I jinxed it. I get the allure of hosting something in your home, but these days when you can get a decent VPS for $10/yr it doesn’t really make sense.
When you're hosting static content (like presumably this content is; it's down so I can't say for sure), you should distribute it on a CDN for $0/year. A single VPS can be overwhelmed by traffic just as your Raspberry Pi can.
P.S. Getting weird RPi errors because of power supply makes you appreciate the value proposition of a good VPS :p
It doesn't make sense because the Raspberry Pi will not be able to serve traffic that one time when your post hits top of HN, which is the one time you really need your hosting plan to work. Yes, it can serve traffic that 99% of time when almost nobody visits your website, but if we look at % of requests served over the timespan of a year, we will see that the website was down for like 95% of users because of that 1 day of downtime.
No, $10 per year, not per month. That means the rPi payback is 5-6 years, and for inferior hardware and bandwidth.
(I have a "One time cost access forever!" VPS, which varies me $9/year "maintenance fees", which I'm happy enough with for the money, but it's definitely "Useful for the price" rather than "decent".)
If you want some good cheap VPS, go check on https://www.lowendtalk.com/ you will find plenty of good ones there. I would suggest to pay a bit more and go with BuyVM, at 20$ per year for their 512 MB offering, but you could definitely get some cheaper just as good somewhere else.
running a commercial VPS in a datacenter has a ton of advantages, but i'm guessing that the guy with a footer like this doesn't really care about them. running your website off a raspi in your living room is cool, wheher it's the most practical solution or not doesn't really matter.
Maybe a raspberry pi behind my sofa isn't so stupid?
Of course you could use multi-cloud/multi-azs, but do you really WANT to for a personal website?
I can't remember the last time my little nano server in US-West-2 has been down.
But yeah, I agree. This is static content, and should be hosted on any of the gazillion free tier CDNs. But then you don’t get that warm fuzzy feeling of watching the rPi behind your couch melt into the floor.
Otherwise, for a well-known average traffic load suitable to a Pi, a Pi is a great idea.
Nowadays a host personal projects on scaleway and netcup (EU based). I've been with the first for a could of years and the second for 6 months now, good service from both.
If you're mainly hosting static* or cacheable content, you may even get by with a raspberry pi running behind cloudflare's free plan with cache enabled. If you don't mind all traffic to your site being served by such a third party of course.
* If you only have static content, GitHub pages can be considered too.
The low end world will shock anyone who has only ever seen AWS pricing.
I saw an VPS from Italy I think for in the region of $20/year some time back, Sephiroth87 was after a $10/year VPS recommendation, not a $60/year one that hvgk suggested.
EDIT: evidently, not far