I'm thinking about buying a Raspberry Pi to start my self-hosted journey. I have three usecases in mind: Navidrome server, Jellyfin server and a Pi-hole network ad-blocking. Can a single machine (like a Raspberry Pi) run these operations simultaneously? Thanks in advance!

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[–] 6 points 19 hours ago

Do not buy a RPI for self hosting. Get a mini PC second hand. It is much much better. And to answer you question, yes you can host multiple services on a single server. Read about virtualization and start learning the ways of proxmox, also say goodbye to your loved ones :)))

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  • [–] [B] 3 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    DNS Domain Name Service/System
    LXC Linux Containers
    NAS Network-Attached Storage
    NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers
    PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole)
    RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
    RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC
    SBC Single-Board Computer
    VPN Virtual Private Network

    8 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.

    [Thread #114 for this comm, first seen 27th Sep 2026, 15:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

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  • [–] 3 points 19 hours ago

    I have like 30 different services running on the same machine.

    That's why you want to use some container solution, I use docker for simplicity.

    Also raspberry pi is not great for self hosting. Any cheap x64 machine will be much more powerful for the same price, and have less compatibility issues.

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  • [–] 1 point 17 hours ago

    A lot of people saying ditch the Pi, but it's fairly viable depending on what exactly you want from it, so long as you get one of the newer models with plenty of RAM. Simply streaming media is relatively manageable for a Pi. It will most likely run Navidrome okay, and Jellyfin will be okay if and only if media doesn't need to be transcoded, and you MIGHT have issues with 4K, not sure. If you stream to something like a smart TV or Fire Stick, those can typically only handle certain video formats, so if your media isn't that type, either the server transcodes it, which the probably Pi can't do fast enough, or playback fails. Music typically doesn't require transcoding, so that's why I think Navidrome should be okay. Pi-Hole is manageable and is, after all, expressly designed to be run on a Pi. It can also be run on standard hardware, so while you can do it on a Pi, you don't need one to use Pi-Hole.

    Now, that said, two main concerns about a Pi. The first is that you'll probably eventually want to host and do more, and you may run out of resources and wish you'd just gotten a cheap mini PC instead. The second is that you really should get an external HDD or something to store as much as you can on, preferably including the OS. An SD card just is not meant to handle the constant I/O that comes with being the main drive for a full computer. It'll eventually fail, taking all the data on it with it. I think the best way to run off an external HDD has changed since I used a Pi, so some research recommended, but what I did before was flash the EXACT SAME image to the SD card and HDD, then delete the boot partition on the HDD, expand the data partition to fill the HDD, and delete the data partition off the SD card. If you use the exact same image for both, it at least used to be that the partitions keep the same UUID, so it boots from the SD card as normal, and when told to find the other partition by UUID, it finds it on the other drive and works just fine.

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  • [–] 1 point 18 hours ago

    Don't waste your time and money on a pi for this. He a cheap mini PC. Like the types that go in the back of the secretary monitor at your dentist office. That pike of junk I'd usually much better than a pi. It even has a box and room for a hard drive.

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  • [–] 1 point 19 hours ago

    Just get an oldish SFF or USFF office computer cheap somewhere. It's generally much cheaper and allows for upgrades if ram/ssd prices ever come down. Also somewhat new Intel CPUs are quite good for transcoding.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 day ago

    Yes yes you csn.

    The old may was we would run these direct like an app on the pi.

    People then came up with containers and isolated things a bit made them easy to share and configure. - dockers

    Have a look for people with blogs about all the software they are running on their pi plenty of info on how.

    Pi isnt the best at jellyfin server as it isnt the best at transcoding files but for direct playing without having to convert the format its enough.

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  • Nah. Totally impossible. Give it up.

    /sarcasm if not obvious

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  • [–] 24 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    I have a Pi 4 that is running a bunch of stuff, including AdGuard(PiHole alternative), JellyFin, Radarr, Sonarr, Lidarr, Readarr, qBitorrent and some others.

    I used DietPi as the OS. Would recommend as it has an AppStore like experience, with pre-configured versions of things ready to install.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 day ago

    As other commenters have said yes you can run these depending on the Pi. Do note however if you need transcoding, A Pi is not recommended by jellyfin:

    https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-selection#potentially-problematic-hardware

    Most Single Board Computers (SBC): Most SBCs (including the Raspberry Pi, especially the Raspberry Pi 5) are too slow to provide an acceptable Jellyfin experience as they often lack proper support for hardware acceleration. If you really want to run Jellyfin on an SBC, you may wish to consider models based on the following platforms: Rockchip RK3588 / RK3588S, Intel Core, Intel 12th gen N series

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago

    So yourself a favor and skip the pi and look for an old server on marketplace (loud and electricity is expensive, but lots of cores) or a NUC if u want a couple servers (or multiple docker containers)

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  • Depends on the Pi in terms of how much you can do, but yes.

    I have a Pi 5, and I'm running Pi Hole, Nginx porxy manager, Jellyfin, Syncthing, Paperless NGX, and a full servarr stack (including Qbittorrent and a VPN). No issues; 4.6 gb out of 7.9gb ram in use, and no appreciable bottlenecks.

    I would just caution that things like Jellyfin are a moveable feast - I am 1 user streaming content on my own to 1 device without issues at 4k. But more simultaneous users and if you start depending on transcoding your mileage may vary. So yes Jellyfin and other services will run fine, but any server can be put under pressure if it's not adequate for the actual usage.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    Define “server”:

    If you mean any process that serves on the network well then of course you can.

    If you mean multiple containerized stacks acting as a service then yes, you can do that too.

    If you mean multiple operating systems, I’m not so sure but I can’t imagine that it’s impossible.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 day ago

    I used to have over 20 services running on a Pi4, I wouldn't suggest running that much, but it'll work

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago

    If you can run multiple applications, you can run multiple servers—a server is just an application with a network interface.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

    Up until the point the resources available (CPU/ram/storage) become a problem.

    That said, managing those apps as installations can be troublesome, which is why people like podman/docker. Updates are more contained, system updates don't break services, and vice-versa.

    A more comprehensive option is to use Proxmox or similar to manage services as a combination of Virtual Machines, LXC'S (Linux containers), and maybe podman/docker on a VM. Note that Proxmox techincally supports importing a docker container as an LXC, but this is a one-time action. Not recommended. (EDIT: For the record, there is a Proxmox on pi effort, but its community supported not Proxmox supported as of the last time I looked.)

    Navidrome and pihole are the easy ones on that list also. Jellyfin itself is easy, but you aren't going to be transcoding video on the fly, so make sure its in a format that is friendly to all of your devices, transcoding in advance if needed.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago*

    Easily! My Pi runs PiHole and a print server and I’ll could probably run almost my entire stack in it if I wanted. Jellyfin would be the hardest due to transcoding CPU usage, but it’s probably ok for one stream at a time.

    The other issue for me would be storage. Since I have a 32TB NAS I run everything that requires large storage on it, but a USB RAID attached to a Pi would probably work just fine.

    The other issue is RAM. I rarely hit 8GB, but do use more than 4GB fairly regularly.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    If the machine has enough power (which for a Pi is heavily varying between generations), yes, you absolutely can! Look into something like Docker Compose (or even running NixOS).

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago

    @libewa @SpiceDealer You do not need docker for running more than one service on a RasPi or another computer. Just configure the web services to listen on an arbitrary port on localhost. Set up a reverse proxy (you can do this with traefik, nginx, apache2 ...) and expose your services with unique names on standard port 443.
    Of course, many services are run via docker in a very comfortable way.

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  • Yes but you should buy 3 and cluster them

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  • [–] 0 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    I would skip Jellyfin on the pi. Other than that, it's all good.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    I always see people saying the Pi is poor for Jellyfin, but I’m running it on a 5 4GB (alongside a fair few other Docker images) and haven’t encountered any really issues. I’m only streaming 1080p and never see any stuttering or bad transcoding.

    That said, I do intend to go with a SFF PC in the future as I’ve pretty quickly hit the point where it’d be better, so OP I would skip the Pi as well.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago (1 child)

    Let me be a bit more specific. If you are doing a couple of light services + jellyfin, maybe you can pull it off. But if you have some critical latency sensitive applications + jellyfin, it can cause issues at random times.

    Also, if you are ONLY hosting Jellyfin with no *arr stack, you should be fine. I made that mistake and my Pi went down to a crawl.

    Test your services together, and based on that decide on the subset of services.

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