That is a good point. However one of my goals/constraints is that I want my home site to be able to connect to other personal devices, e.g. a NAS (another WIP project). My ideal vision is a simple site running on my network, backed up on some kind of cloud storage.

Any suggestions? Though I'm a software engineer, I've worked mostly in app dev rather than infrastructure setup. This project is a way for me to learn more about the latter. The rpi is the easiest and cheapest option, but I have wondered if it wouldn't make more sense to use AWS or something like that. I wouldn't mind paying a few bucks a month, but more than that and I'd rather wait until I've learned a bit and know what my specific needs are. I've also considered an actual computer, but figure it's a waste of power when my initial work will probably just be figuring out the server config, HTML pages, etc.

>That is a good point. However one of my goals/constraints is that I want my home site to be able to connect to other personal devices, e.g. a NAS (another WIP project). My ideal vision is a simple site running on my network, backed up on some kind of cloud storage.

You could host everything on your home network but there are a couple of things you should probably know before you start: 1) Some ISP do not give you static IP, meaning its extra work

2) Security - Ideally your home network has some kind of segregation, you keep your trusted devices on one, IoT or not patchable on another for example, with firewall blocking connections from dirty network to clean one. Having externally facing website potentially having direct access to personal devices and services might be an issue from security point of view.

You can sign up on AWS/Azure or any other cloud provider for free and get free credits, which might be enough for you to learn. Feel free to ask further questions if you need to