Discussion
I looked at self-hosting using a Virtual Private Server (VPS), but there's a saying in the security community: "If you can touch it, you own it." Basically, if somebody at a VPS vendor wants to load malware on a server I'm hosting on their system, there's absolutely no way for me to keep it from happening.
I have Gigabit Fiber to my house, so doing some kind of self-hosting at home seemed doable. Also, I have a couple of sites around the state where I can situate a backup system, so self-hosting a server made sense to me.
I have a TrueNAS Scale server at the house for home media, and I could have just put everything there. But there were a couple of reasons I decided against going that route:
- My home cloud is going to have to be accessible from outside my home network. I really didn't want to expose my TrueNAS Scale server to that security risk.
- I still don't have that server backed up, partly because I'm not exactly sure how to do so. It's more complex than the normal small Linux machines I'm used to. I don't want to risk losing all of my data because I lose that server.
So, I needed to go with something simpler, something I could easily back up and restore if I had a major failure.
I really like the processing power vs electrical power draw of Raspberry Pi devices, so I decided to put together a Raspberry Pi with a large amount of storage for the house and another at a remote location for backups. I could have gone with a NUC or other type of server, but if I have a failure of the main Pi board, I can just pop the MicroSD/SSD into another Pi and be back up and running ASAP. They don't draw much power, and the amount of data I'll be dealing with is low enough that the bottleneck of using the x1 PCIe buss to the NVME board really isn't that big of a consideration for me. In my case, the 1Gb Internet connection or WiFi 5 AP in my house are likely the real bottlenecks. So, I decided on using a Raspberry Pi 5 setup for my home cloud.
Next: 1. Raspberry Pi Hardware