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The original was posted on /r/foundryvtt by /u/Flying-Squad on 2025-02-03 15:10:07+00:00.

A while back I wrote that I was going to try hosting at home with slow internet connection (60mbps download, 5mbps upload), with all the large files (images, etc.) on an AWS S3 bucket. It seems to work fine.

I host with a Raspberry Pi 5 (8MB RAM and 128MB SSD), which I got from Microcenter. This was pretty easy to set up. The generic Ubuntu instructions for setting up Foundry work fine.

The AWS S3 bucket costs about a buck a month. I got a domain name from Cloudflare for three bucks a year.

We have a dynamic IP address, so I also use a Cloudflare tunnel instead of opening up a port on my modem and using one of the Dynamic DNS services like duckdns. You can set up multiple host names linked to different ports on the tunnel, which is nice if you want to host multiple servers.

It actually worked better than I thought it would. The first time you open a character sheet you can see that it’s a little slower than a server like Molten or Forge, but after that everything is cached and you don’t see any performance hits. The big files are on AWS, so I wasn’t trying to send 10MB map files to every player when the scene switched.

It also seemed more reliable than Molten or Forge. When playing on those servers, three or four times a night someone in the group (we have six players and a GM using six connections, two on the LAN, four on the Cloudflare tunnel) has to reload the browser because of some mismatch in the scene or other glitch (probably due to dropped packets).

We didn’t see any of that with the local hosting. Maybe we got lucky.

The Pi’s fan never turned on, and it’s barely warm to the touch, so it’s got more than enough horsepower. It is one of the higher-end machines, so a Pi 4 might strain a bit more.

When I originally tried self-hosting the image files were stored on my local machine and the performance was unacceptable. With the large files on AWS it works fine.

So if you’ve got an extra PC and a slow internet connection, you can try this setup and maybe save a few bucks a month by hosting yourself.