Serving a website on a Raspberry Pi Zero running in RAM (opens in new tab)

Yeah, I've seen this in more than a few places. There was a blog "running on a Wii" that, IIRC, was doing the same thing.

On the one hand I get it, TLS is pretty heavy, and it makes sense to take advantage of a VPS or Cloudflare or however you want to do it.

But once you are spinning up a VPS, the question is ... why the Pi? The VPS in the article has less RAM, but more storage. If you're already doing TLS termination on the VPS (the most RAM intensive part), you might as well just do the whole shebang there.

I know this is all for fun, I'm just wondering -- is the Pi Zero really too slow to handle TLS, especially with an optimized TLS library? In this setup, the Pi is already being directly exposed to the Internet anyway, there's no VPN being used. That ARM11 isn't "fast", but surely a 1 GHz ARM11 can handle an optimized TLS library serving some subset of TLS1.2.

It is more than a little weird. A pi zero is more than capable of handling HTTP/1.2 and TLS 1.3 for a handful of connections per second. This machine is 10x what we were running web servers on in the '90s.

Also, all web pages are served from RAM. It's automatic that modern OSes will cache this stuff on first access.

It reminds me of the footage of Doom running on a pregnancy test. And then it turned out it was another computer just displaying to the build in AMOLED display.

What was supposed to be a cool achievement is rendered pointless when one of the key elements is offloaded elsewhere.

Sometimes these demos enable caching on the reverse proxy. So then for these tiny demo html pages you request, you may not even reach the fun tiny computer it is supposed to demonstrate.

Considering that a 'base' raspbian type install can be something like 160MB of RAM used with openssh running and a lot of other launched-from-systemd daemons in the background, that leaves plenty of RAM available for a stock apache2 or nginx setup with TLS. No it won't be able to serve a ton of simultaneous requests, but I'm in agreement with the other comments here that doing purely port 80/http and putting it behind a secondary TLS proxy is not really "serving the website" from the raspberry pi.

I wouldn’t consider “the way most people do TLS in 2026” weird. That said this isn’t all that impressive or interesting, a computer… serving a website.

Why even serve TLS here?

I hosted my personal email domain on a Zero for almost 10 years. It had about the same capability as the very expensive (and large) Win NT4 machine we used for our 80-person organization when I started my career in tech. I eventually replaced the Zero with a Raspberry Pi 4, primarily because the Zero’s IO ports are annoying (eg, USB is not hot-pluggable!) An RPi 4 is extreme overkill for personal email but it still idles under 1W and when it fails I can replace the entire machine for next to nothing.

The point of failure for all of these machines has been the SD card. They seem to last 4 years almost to the day. I suppose if I set up a RAMdisk they might last longer, but honestly, for the price of an SD card it’s not really worth my time.

Hey, it loads! Unlike ~10% of pages on first page of HN, hugged to death.

The website running on the vape was far more interesting than this. I do wonder if anyone has tried to use the microphone in these devices to listen to audio. Backdoored vape

I am serving a small web interface to control my shutters on an esp32. I even did the experiment to not parse the request and just always respond with the same response, so a webserver for a single page can be trivial (you would have embed images and all other resources into the html then). But of course I am parsing the request, because I need separate routes for the page and for the actions. Since this is on my home lan it doesn't even need ssl. I guess as long as the traffic is low, an esp32 might be able to do ssl. For me that isn't relevant because it isn't on the internet and when I want to connect to it from outside my home lan, I just use wireguard.

Indeed, you can even permanently run one using a balcony solar panel:

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/

My thoughts exactly. People regularly run Pi-Hole on these things, which not only is "serving a website" (the dashboard) but is also being a DNS server.

I have never been able to stream video from a raspberry pi zero's official camera. What tools/software were you using?

In the good old days a decade or so ago where the full fat Pi board was always 35 dollars and the zero was just 5, they were so cheap as to be practically disposable. I have an insane number of Pi 3/4 and Zero/ZeroW boards in projects and drawers around the house, but this has massively tapered off as prices have gone up. At one point I had an 8 pi 3 cluster to learn kubernetes/container orchestration techniques on - completely unnecessary, but building the little rack was 85% of the fun. That cluster ran my home stack for years (DNS, home automation, network admin UI etc).

I've since got a lot more interested in the microcontroller community - so many Pi projects should really be microcontroller projects - the esp32 especially scratches the itch for cheap things to hack on, and you can get them for like 6-7 bucks each with wifi.

I assembled a solar server with those parts laying around last year:

- Victron Monocrystalline Panel 90W 12V

- Victron Gel Battery 12V 60Ah

- Victron MPPT Charge Controller 75V 15A

- Raspberry Pi Zero W

- Witty Pi 5

- Sixfab 4G/LTE Base HAT

- Quectel EC25 Mini PCle 4G/LTE Module

Almost 100% uptime except for a few days after a bad winter storm, pretty neat!

what makes that truly diskless? that's still getting the bytes from a disk somewhere

i think if the disk is not necessary for the whole runtime after boot, that's fair to call diskless

except in RAM based OS the page size and computation resources reduce significantly as OS is using the same memory to run instead of reading from disk and eating up critical memory area for applications, only thing in between a full crash and OS is the swap storage, macOS and Windows would never be even able to achieve this it is possible only due to Linux/BSD and it's level of optimization.

a better way would be to boot via nvme SSD, ethernet boot has a dependency of network, what if you need to debug when network is down or debug the errors/bugs network itself ?

First time I hear about DietPi OS, does it offer a headless distro?

I self host some CI runners and do kernel work on a Pi writing some software defined radio things.

For the radio stuff I can just take the Pi, frontend, and a battery pack outside to test.

When I finally move to a place with proper fiber internet I'm going to be hosting several side projects on a handful of Pis.

Came here to say the same. The Zero is a very capable machine

Running a mainstream website on a RPi Pico W is more advanced, but still not really challenging as long as the content is static

What makes it "production grade"? How are you defining that?

It’s ddr2 so it is not really affected by the ram crunch