I am considering setting up a Raspberry Pi 2 as a home server. It would run a samba share as a work directory and nginx as a webserver, possibly with the MEAN stack later on. All for my own sake, not for public. Would this be a worth the effort to set up, or am I better off renting a server on LiNode or some other similar service?
I figure I need to brush up on my Linux skills, its been a while…
I’d say a raspi is enough to host your private projects, given the software you need is available on arm, builds are probably a bit slowish.
Why do you want to use a dedicated machine for that task? Before completely switching to Linux I used it in a VM, which was quite convenient. Give it 2gigs of ram and one or two cores and you get more than enough performance for your use cases, I think.
Renting a server seems to be overkill for a single developer, but it’s probably convenient in some situations.
If you want to learn how to play with a Raspberry Pi, go for it. If you’re looking just at the utility of it, I’d say this is not the best option. If you don’t want to just run off a VM as @lincore suggested, you might check AWS’s free year offer.
On the other hand, if you’re looking for an excuse to play with a Raspberry Pi and learn the tools to use it as a home server, go ahead. 