A Raspberry Pi 5 in a data centre can run a personal website, a blog or a small online shop. You get root access, a public IP address and a server that runs nothing but your own stuff.
What runs on it
On Raspberry Pi OS or Ubuntu you install a web server just like on any other Linux machine. Nginx with PHP-FPM is light and fast on a Raspberry Pi; Apache makes sense when you need .htaccess files. A Let's Encrypt certificate takes a few minutes with certbot.
sudo apt update
sudo apt install nginx php-fpm certbot python3-certbot-nginx
sudo certbot --nginx -d your-domain.comPoint your domain at the IPv4 and IPv6 address the Raspberry Pi gets. No port forwarding and no dynamic DNS.
Who it's for
People who want the server under their own control: their own PHP version and modules, cron jobs, maybe Node.js or Python next to the website. Drupal and WordPress both run fine on a Raspberry Pi 5.
If all you want is a website without looking after a server, ordinary shared hosting is simpler, because updates and backups are handled for you.
When it must not go down
Two Raspberry Pis behind HAProxy keep a website running even if one of them fails. The steps are in our guide to HAProxy and keepalived on a Raspberry Pi. It's worth talking a setup like this through with support first.