Why I Stopped Using a Raspberry Pi for Self-Hosting

Raspberry Pis are iconic devices among home lab enthusiasts, self-hosting enthusiasts, and tinkerers. While they can be used for self-hosting services, I completely stopped using them for that purpose only and moved my projects to a mini PC. This is why.

What is a Raspberry Pi good for?

The Raspberry Pi was originally developed as a crafting board, so they all have a lot of general purpose in-out (GPIO) pins. They need to be connected to motors, sensors, and pretty much any other peripheral or hardware component you want.

That makes them really great when you need to build something that requires both software and hardware, but you don’t want to go through the trouble of developing your own embedded system from scratch.

Plus, the wide range of Raspberry Pis, from Picos, which are low-power devices, to the Raspberry Pi 5, which is essentially a mini PC, means you can find a Pi suitable for almost anything you want to build.

The problem with Raspberry PIs for self-hosting

Despite the fact that Raspberry Pis are fantastic all around, even the most powerful members of the lineup are beaten in the benchmarks by similarly priced mini PCs.

That doesn’t mean Pis is bad, it isn’t. They are simply designed for a different purpose.

Arm compatibility lags behind x86-64

One of the biggest and first problems I encountered when using Raspberry Pis for self-hosting is the lack of support for Arm processors. Despite Arm’s increasing popularity in recent years, a large number of self-hosted applications still do not support it.

This is especially the case with smaller projects maintained by small teams of volunteers or even individuals. Sometimes maintaining support for two different architectures is too much, or porting them at all is too much to ask.

It can also be a problem if you host older software. Often these programs have not been actively developed for years, and probably never will be again. This is a problem I often encounter when trying to host game servers on my Raspberry Pi.

The Pi processors are a bit underpowered

The Raspberry Pi 5 features a Broadcom BCM2712a quad-core processor, and up to 16 GB of RAM on the most expensive model.

If you want to build some sort of embedded project that requires a ‘brain’, or something ultra-portable, those specs are pretty hefty. However, if you are trying to host an entire miniature home lab yourself, this is not the best option.

You can get mini PCs with Intel’s N150 CPU for about the same price that will run around the Pi 5 all day long. As an added bonus, these mini PCs often have a higher maximum amount of RAM and better hardware transcoding support if you want to use a media server on your mini PC.

Additionally, the N150 (and better CPUs) support DDR5, which is noticeably faster than the DDR4 on the Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5.

Using a MicroSD card and USB drives for bootable disks is not ideal

Although the Pi 5 added native support for NVMe storage with an M.2 slot, most Raspberry Pi models out there today are still limited to booting from a microSD card or USB drive.

Neither microSD cards nor USB drives are designed with long-term high-frequency read and write performance in mind. That means they’re just not as reliable under long-term heavy use, like the boot drive of a dedicated self-hosted PC, compared to their solid-state drive cousins.

---

None of these criticisms are to say that Raspberry Pis are bad, that the Pi 5 is bad, or that you should never use one for self-hosting. If you have one nearby, and you want to run something like a Pihole, do it – it will work fine. If you have nothing else and just want to try it, then by all means go for it. You definitely won’t regret your experience.

However, if you’re plunking down $120 dollars for a 16GB Raspberry Pi 5, and then more for storage, a power supply, and a case with the intention of self-hosting a slew of services at home, you should really look at the introductory mini PCs first. They probably offer better value for money.