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Do you need a server to run a support wallboard?

A practical guide · ~5 min read

Short answer: no — not a proper one. A support wallboard is a light piece of software that polls your helpdesk on a cadence and draws a screen. You can run it on hardware you already own, or skip the hardware entirely and have it hosted for you. Here's how to decide.

What a wallboard actually needs to run

It helps to right-size the problem. A wallboard isn't a database-heavy application serving thousands of users — it's a single process that fetches ticket counts, SLA timers and agent activity from your helpdesk's API every minute or so, and serves one dashboard to the screens looking at it. That's a modest workload. It needs a machine that stays on, a network connection, and not much else.

So the real question isn't "can my hardware cope?" — almost anything can. It's "who do I want looking after the box?"

Option 1 — run it on hardware you already have

Self-hosting is free and, for a lot of teams, genuinely the easiest path. Nexus runs as a small Docker container or a self-contained desktop app, and it's happy on:

• A spare PC or Mac in the corner of the office — the classic "the dashboard machine".
• A mini PC or NUC tucked behind the TV it drives.
• A Raspberry Pi — a Pi 4/5 will happily run the board and drive a wall screen as a kiosk. It draws a few watts and costs less than a month of most SaaS tools.
• An existing internal server or VM, if you'd rather it lived in the rack with everything else.

The upside of self-hosting is total control: your helpdesk credentials and data never leave your network, and there's no third party in the loop. The trade-off is that updates, backups and keeping the box alive are yours to own — which, for a screen on a wall, is usually trivial, but it's still a job.

Option 2 — don't run a server at all

If you'd rather not own a box — no spare machine, no appetite for patching, or you just want it live today — you can have Nexus hosted for you. That gives you your own private instance (never a shared pool), running in a UK/EU region, reachable at your own subdomain in minutes. Updates, backups and the HTTPS certificate are handled for you, and a hosted board even updates itself and rolls back automatically if a new version misbehaves — so there's genuinely nothing to keep alive.

It's an optional add-on (+£15/mo on any plan), and because it's the same Nexus either way, you're never locked in: move to self-hosting whenever you like and take your board with you.

How to choose

• You have a spare machine and like control → self-host. A Pi or an old PC is plenty.
• You want it live today with nothing to maintain → let us host it as a private instance.
• You have strict data-residency or no-third-party rules → self-host, or read how the hosted option keeps your instance private and in-region.
• Not sure yet → start self-hosted or hosted; switching later is painless.

Either way, the hard part was never the server. It's deciding what to put on the screen — and that's the fun part. Our guide on the KPIs worth tracking is a good next read.