What can I run a website on?

[Yqish]

I have made a basic website on my pc and want to put it onto a dedicated machine. Will something like a raspberry pi 3b+ work or would I have to go for a 4 wit 4gb? or 8gb? 

[Eigenvektor]

If it's a basic website with HTML and some CSS, it could basically run on a toaster, so a 3b+ is more than enough.

 

Install a lightweight Linux distro, install a web server (nginx or Apache) then configure it to serve the page.

[Yqish]

8 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

If it's a basic website with HTML and some CSS, it could basically run on a toaster, so a 3b+ is more than enough.

 

Install a lightweight Linux distro, install a web server (nginx or Apache) then configure it to serve the page.

There is a good chance that I add a basic login system and possible a small forum would I still be able to run that on the RAM of the 3b+ also how much storage would you recommend? 

 

[Eigenvektor]

39 minutes ago, Yqish said:

There is a good chance that I add a basic login system and possible a small forum would I still be able to run that on the RAM of the 3b+ also how much storage would you recommend?

Depends. If you're going to use a database like MariaDB for the forum you might want to use a bit more than 1 GB. Storage is hard to say without having any existing data, but something like 10 GB should be plenty and maybe ~2-4 GB for the OS.

 

If you build this thing with minimal configuration and make sure to store all data in the database it should be very easy to migrate to another system if need be.

 

~edit: for the sake of comparison, I've previously had a wordpress instance running on a vserver with only 512 MB of RAM. With some tweaking I even got GitLab running on that machine (their recommended minimum for 500 users was 2 GB back then). Of course this was just for some personal projects. So if this is just for personal use or maybe together with some friends the 3b+ should hold up fine. The speed of your internet connection (especially upstream) will make a much bigger difference.

[jj9987]

A Raspberry Pi can easily host a static website. The company behind Raspberry Pi actually used Raspberry Pi 4's to host their website when they launched Pi 4 to demonstrate it's capabilities [0]. You can easily run a database and a server (PHP, Go, Node.js or whatever else) and run those also on the Raspberry Pi, but it all depends on how much traffic/server load you are going to have. You can start on the Pi and upgrade to a bigger server later on (your own server, a VPS or some other service from likes of AWS, GCP, Azure, DigitalOcean etc). It all depends on how much you are willing to spend and what requirements you have.

 

Also, with the Raspberry Pi, do keep in mind that SD cards are not designed to very many writes, so while you can run a database on it, I wouldn't consider it a reliable solution for long-term.

[0] - https://www.techrepublic.com/article/low-cost-raspberry-pi-4-cluster-hosts-official-pi-website-handles-record-traffic-for-pi-4-launch/

 

EDIT: Here's also official Raspberry Pi post on their hosting - https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/website-hosting-on-raspberry-pi-4-with-mythic-beasts/