Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM • Hacker News Board

Re: Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM

#41

Post by girishso » Fri, May 08, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

raddan wrote: post #5

MitPitt wrote: post #2

A raspberry zero is more powerful than an enterprise server from the 1990s. A minimalist static website is not impressive. You can fit way more in there.

I hosted my personal email domain on a Zero for almost 10 years. It had about the same capability as the very expensive (and large) Win NT4 machine we used for our 80-person organization when I started my career in tech. I eventually replaced the Zero with a Raspberry Pi 4, primarily because the Zero’s IO ports are annoying (eg, USB is not hot-pluggable!) An RPi 4 is extreme overkill for personal email but it still i…

Interesting, what tools did you use for email hosting?

I’m scared of self hosting a mailbox.

Re: Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM

#42

Post by amtamt » Fri, May 08, 2026, 5:56 PM UTC

girishso wrote: post #41

raddan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hosted my personal email domain on a Zero for almost 10 years. It had about the same capability as the very expensive (and large) Win NT4 machine we used for our 80-person organization when I started my career in tech. I eventually replaced the Zero with a Raspberry Pi 4, primarily because the Zero’s IO ports are annoying (eg, USB is not hot-pluggable!) An RPi 4 is extreme overkill for personal email but it still i…

Interesting, what tools did you use for email hosting? I’m scared of self hosting a mailbox.

https://www.xmox.nl/ is pretty good single binary mail solution for personal email hosting, it not too many features of modern webmails are needed.

Re: Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM

#43

Post by doginasuit » Fri, May 08, 2026, 5:59 PM UTC

For optimal moral support, have one of the spare Pis holding a sign, maybe "Pi is our guy"

Re: Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM

#44

Post by amatecha » Fri, May 08, 2026, 6:05 PM UTC

wang_li wrote: post #13

c0nsumer wrote: post #8

This feels a little weird because while they are running the website itself (HTTP) off the Pi, they are handing off all TLS to a cloud provider. So while the content is in RAM on the Pi, a lot of the heavier lifting (TLS termination) is done elsewhere, which saves a ton of CPU load on the Pi.

It is more than a little weird. A pi zero is more than capable of handling HTTP/1.2 and TLS 1.3 for a handful of connections per second. This machine is 10x what we were running web servers on in the '90s. Also, all web pages are served from RAM. It's automatic that modern OSes will cache this stuff on first access.

Yeah, I ran a phpbb forum (alongside my normal static site) on a 486 in 2003 or so. It worked. It was slow, but it worked just fine for my friends and I! I remember it took multiple minutes to generate the SSH server key after the initial install lol

Re: Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM

#45

Post by lostapathy » Fri, May 08, 2026, 6:05 PM UTC

girishso wrote: post #41

raddan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hosted my personal email domain on a Zero for almost 10 years. It had about the same capability as the very expensive (and large) Win NT4 machine we used for our 80-person organization when I started my career in tech. I eventually replaced the Zero with a Raspberry Pi 4, primarily because the Zero’s IO ports are annoying (eg, USB is not hot-pluggable!) An RPi 4 is extreme overkill for personal email but it still i…

Interesting, what tools did you use for email hosting? I’m scared of self hosting a mailbox.

Self hosting a mailbox is easy - getting email back out is the hard part.

Re: Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM

#46

Post by static_motion » Fri, May 08, 2026, 6:24 PM UTC

MitPitt wrote: post #2

A raspberry zero is more powerful than an enterprise server from the 1990s. A minimalist static website is not impressive. You can fit way more in there.

My thoughts exactly. People regularly run Pi-Hole on these things, which not only is "serving a website" (the dashboard) but is also being a DNS server.

Re: Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM

#47

Post by slow_typist » Fri, May 08, 2026, 6:30 PM UTC

Instead of having an open port in my router and sending data in plain text, I would use an ssh tunnel or a vpn. Or probably put the entire web site on the VPS.

Re: Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM

#48

Post by Multiplayer » Fri, May 08, 2026, 6:44 PM UTC

bsoles wrote: post #29

_stiofan wrote: post #14

The pi zero's are great. I have a bunch of them. I used to use them as a tiny server for live webcams streaming to YouTube for customers, but YouTube now have a minimum sub count before you can go live, which sucks. These boards are pretty powerful.

I have never been able to stream video from a raspberry pi zero's official camera. What tools/software were you using?

I'm using an 8MP camera from freenove on a pi zero 2 - it's great.

Re: Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM

#49

Post by abdullahkhalids » Fri, May 08, 2026, 6:48 PM UTC

girishso wrote: post #41

raddan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hosted my personal email domain on a Zero for almost 10 years. It had about the same capability as the very expensive (and large) Win NT4 machine we used for our 80-person organization when I started my career in tech. I eventually replaced the Zero with a Raspberry Pi 4, primarily because the Zero’s IO ports are annoying (eg, USB is not hot-pluggable!) An RPi 4 is extreme overkill for personal email but it still i…

Interesting, what tools did you use for email hosting? I’m scared of self hosting a mailbox.

Have been using Mail-in-a-box [1] for about 5 years [1]. I haven't done any maintenance for at least 3 years, besides occasionally clicking restart in the admin webpanel every time it does serious security updates.

I don't send a lot of emails from it, but the ones I do are delivered.

[1] https://mailinabox.email/

Re: Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM

#50

Post by stkdump » Fri, May 08, 2026, 6:52 PM UTC

MitPitt wrote: post #2

A raspberry zero is more powerful than an enterprise server from the 1990s. A minimalist static website is not impressive. You can fit way more in there.

I am serving a small web interface to control my shutters on an esp32. I even did the experiment to not parse the request and just always respond with the same response, so a webserver for a single page can be trivial (you would have embed images and all other resources into the html then). But of course I am parsing the request, because I need separate routes for the page and for the actions. Since this is on my home lan it doesn't even need ssl. I guess as long as the traffic is low, an esp32 might be able to do ssl. For me that isn't relevant because it isn't on the internet and when I want to connect to it from outside my home lan, I just use wireguard.