HN

Comments (67)

• Menu

  c0nsumer
  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.
• Menu

  MitPitt
  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.
• Menu

  jcalvinowens
  I have a self hosting Pi Zero W running Gentoo. It started as a joke, but I kept it because it's actually occasionally useful for testing new kernel releases.I found a fun bug with it a couple years ago: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...It is still able to build software faster than it is released. It takes roughly a month to recompile the entire system :D
• FlyingSnake
  PiZero is a pretty solid machine.I run my micro-homelab on a Pi Zero from 2018. It’s behind Cloudflare tunnels. It runs the apps i need on a DietPi OS within 180MB and it’s uptime is ~8 months.
• backtogeek
  Brilliant write up, just 1 correction, the TierHive VPS should only be $1.20 per year not $4 :)
• grahammccain
  I’ve wanted to get into raspberry pi builds for a long time. Off to order one now and try this.
• seemaze
  I've been using Raspberry Pi Zeros for cheap little linux appliances since they were released. Boot them up with the latest Alpine Linux and run the whole thing from ram. You can also remove a card from a running machine with no ill affect, and they easily survive power cuts. I've never had a card fail.
• Menu

  dividuum
  I guess "Diskless" was defined by the same people that invented the term "Serverless"? That Pi is still using an SD card to boot from.A Pi with Ethernet can truly boot diskless via TFTP. And later Pi4 and Pi5 can even boot directly from the internet by getting their initial "boot.img" FAT partition via HTTP from anywhere. That would be diskless.
• sphars
  The OP link is not to Pi zero website, here's the actual website that's being hosted on the Raspberry Pi:https://zero.btxx.org/
• vednig
  we're running a complete production grade cloud storage service with Raspberry Pi Zeros at https://getcloud.doshare.me that's how powerful Rpi hardware we've tested it for upto 10k concurrent requests with storage ofcourse, but still too far powerful
• Menu

  _stiofan
  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.
• fdjafhdasfjhds
  RAM? In this economy?!
• doginasuit
  For optimal moral support, have one of the spare Pis holding a sign, maybe "Pi is our guy"
• slow_typist
  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.
• Venn1
  They are powerful little devices. I used a Pi Zero 2 with an ethernet adapter to host an x86 TrackMania² server using BOX64 and it never had a problem. Only swapped it out recently because I needed the Zero 2 for another project.
• orliesaurus
  So what benchmarks did you run or what's the advantage? Might as well just run the site on the VPS at this point since you're paying for it?
• basilikum
  The Pi Zero has 512MB RAM and a one GIGA Hertz CPU. It's a fucking super computer. Maybe not today, but not that long ago and back then people were running much more intensive things on them than hosting a website. It should be perfectly capable of handling TLS. AES might be a bit haeavy without hardware acceleration, but you can also do only ChaCha20 as the single supported server cipher. It would be easy to DDOS, but you should be able to mostly address that with firewall rules rate limiting connection attempts upstream.I don't mean to shit on this, exploration is nice and putting perfectly fitting hardware to use instead of throwing abundant unnecessary hardware on every simple problem — just to bring it to crawl with loads of shitty bloates software — is good, but it's not particularly impressive.
• wolvoleo
  Umm some people run a website on a conmodore 64. That's impressive.A Raspberry Pi Zero can just run apache.
• sam_lowry_
  tell OP about tftp
• Menu

  jcgrillo
  After seeing what new R-Pi stuff is selling for I went rummaging in the parts drawer and found the following:- R-Pi Zero W- Sixfab UPS hat- Sixfab Cellular IoT App Shield- R-Pi model 1BWith all this I should be able to make a multiply redundant always-on bastion host. It's awesome that alpine supports the armhf stuff, many OSes have dropped 32bit support entirely.
• starik36
  I have several of these running all sorts of quickie utilities. The key for making things faster (at least for my tasks) was to write everything I need in c#.For whatever reason, the speed seems far faster than Python for me.