Need advices for a small web server

[Danielsan]

Hi guys,

I would like to know your opinion about a small web server.

I am currently studying some frameworks to improve my skill as web designer and I would like to have my local server where test my websites (in wordpress mainly), as I am using my workstation mainly for rendering I don't want install on it a lamp stack as well, so I thought I may buy a small arm sbc and use it as web server.

After some research this is what I though:

Cheapest and better supported:
Raspberry Pi 3 + WD PiDrive + Case + Power Supply: $85.

Pros: Pricing, better support, can use Debian, can boot directly from the external drive, built-in wifi & bluetooth.
Cons: Only 1gb of memory, kernel stack not entirely at 64-bit, CPU not so fast, spinning drive.

Powerful but expensive:
Odroid C2 + Case + Wifi adapter + SATA Adapter + Power Supply + generic SSD: $185.

Pros: Better hardware, 2GB of memory, Giga ethernet.
Cons: Pricing, worst support, only Ubuntu as official OS.

I have already a PI2 which I am using with OSMC as mediacenter as well as nas connected to a 5T hdd. It works fine, especially when I moved from raspian to OSMC which is essentially Debian with some tuning.

Basically the two boards have the same price but as I far I know the wd pidrive works only with the PI. If I have to use the piDrive adapter for the Pi because I want an SSD drive the price for both would be basically the same and thus, in terms of hardware, the Odroid C2 is more powerful than the PI3 but Debian is not officially supported.

What do you think about it? Do you have different experience to share?

Thanks

[geekosupremo]

Any particular reason you don't run the server in a VM?

[kedaha]

I use a raspberry pi 2 as a headless server for trying out software rather than on my main server; it works great.
I've installed the Debian jessie-rpi2-20150705.img on it in preference to Raspbian. Further details at debian-jessie-on-rpi2/.
I boot the pi with the sdd card and have moved the root rile system to an external IDE 320 g hard disk drive in same way as for raspbian as detailed in the HOWTO at raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=44177. The hdd is connected to the pi by usb and has its own power supply.

[Danielsan]

@ Geekosupremo
Actually I have never though at this solution which seems simply awesome, so when I don't need the web server active I can simply deactivate the vm... I must absolutely investigate how!

@ Kedaha
I have not idea if the Pi 3 is able to handle the web server, actually I will be the only one who request something to the web server... However the vm solution it seems to me the best because I don't need to spend a cent, and my virtual machine would be 100 time powerful than the PI.

[ralph.ronnquist]

Hmm. "wordpress" and "small server" aren't totally compatible notions, are they?. I believe wordpress requires PHP since it's CGI scripts are in PHP,, and it requires mysql (or postgres, perhaps?) since that's where it stores the templates and pages and whatnots. It's a couple of years since I used it, and maybe it's changed for the better and become slimmer and more streamlined (unlike most other things).

And of course that doesn't rule out installing it on a low-end host configuration, but you do need an HTTP server that implements full CGI 1.x (which is rather more than just serving HTML pages).

[Danielsan]

I think the Pi 2/3 are able to handle several access on a lamp stack, clearly they can't serve thousands or millions of connections at the same time as a real server, however I decided to create a virtual web server through Virtualbox which is faster than the PI as well as the cheapest solution.

[gradinaruvasile]

You could use kvm+libvirt(optionally virt-manager for gui) - its there in the kernel, no module compilation needed and has great support for linux guests + it can automatically start at boot/shut down guests at shutdown/reboot, no micromanagement needed.

[geekosupremo]

@Danielsan
A Pi (almost any version) should be enough to run a LAMP or MEAN server. It probably wouldn't do well under a heavy load, but it would be fine for testing.

@gradinaruvasile 's solution is also a good one if you're angling for higher performace.

The VirtualBox, that it looks like you've gone with, is almost ideal for a "test" environment, IMO. No extra hardware and you'll always have it with you. You will probably want to setup the network of the VM to be a "bridged adaptor" so that it will appear on the network as a full device.