Use cases

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.

A Raspberry Pi in a data centre as your own VPN server. Connect from a café, a hotel or abroad through your own IP address in the Czech Republic, with the traffic between you and the server encrypted.

Docker runs on a Raspberry Pi 5 just like on a server. Deploy Nextcloud, Forgejo, Vaultwarden or your own app with docker compose.

Your smart home hub in a data centre. Control and automations work from anywhere, and a power or internet outage at home won't take down the interface or your history.

Your own cloud for files, calendars and contacts. Phone photos, shared folders and syncing between computers, on a Raspberry Pi in the data centre instead of someone else's servers.

How to install it

The easiest way is Nextcloud All-in-One. It's a single container that sets up and updates everything else: the database, a cache and certificates. It runs on arm64, so a Raspberry Pi 5 is fine.

Your own Bitwarden-compatible password server. Your passwords stay on your Raspberry Pi in the data centre, not with a company you have to trust.

Your own GitHub for a small team. Repositories, pull requests, issues and CI on a Raspberry Pi in the data centre, reachable from anywhere.

Why Forgejo

Forgejo is a community fork of Gitea, run by a non-profit. It's written in Go, starts in seconds and is happy with 1 GB of RAM. The web interface will feel familiar to anyone who knows GitHub.

A Raspberry Pi in a data centre watches your websites and servers from a place that doesn't share their outages. When your home connection or a server at another provider goes down, the monitoring knows and tells you.

Telegram and Discord bots, n8n workflows, scrapers and scheduled scripts. Things that need to run all the time, without a laptop left switched on at home.

Your own DNS server on a Raspberry Pi: a recursive one with Pi-hole that drops ads and trackers on the way, or an authoritative one for your domains.

Your own mail server on your own domain. A Raspberry Pi in a data centre has a fixed public IP address, which a mail server at home almost always lacks.

Your own chat server on the open XMPP protocol, once known as Jabber. Messages stay on your server, and it talks to other XMPP servers on its own.

Prosody or ejabberd

Prosody is light and takes an afternoon to set up on a Raspberry Pi. ejabberd suits a larger number of users. Both handle OMEMO encryption, file sharing and push notifications.