This website made me reconsider if 99.9999% SLA and always online is really that important for lots of websites. I used to self-host my own server in my own apartment, but gave up on that after my internet provider had their first major outage that lasted almost a week. Also I didn’t want to worry about the fire hazard, or the server going down when I was traveling etc.
But a solar powered server seems interesting, if the batteries could be made fire safe.
Having everything open, on and available 24/7/365 sounds nice until you realize the human toll for things which aren’t that necessary and can be planned around. Down time is a good thing.
I host my personal site at home with a 15-min battery backup. After that, I accept the downtime. Rarely happens and I haven’t had a single complaint when it does.
Of course, it depends on the website. I’d be unhappy if my banking site went down for more than a day.
ihavenotv.com could go down for weeks, and I wouldn’t fret it.
“Hey look everyone! We never heard of grid scale batteries!”
doesn’t every website go down when there is no power? ;)
Only if there is no power everywhere. Some run redundancies in multiple locations.
So… You’re saying that if there’s no power the website goes down.
I used to work on the website for a utility company that insisted on ridiculous uptime. Our major deployments risked taking the system down for a few seconds, though in practice that never happened.
As a result, they made us do deployments starting at 3:00 in the morning since that was the least active time on the site. Fuuuuuuuuck that place.
Interesting concept. I haven’t seen lowtechmagazine before, going to have to definitely check it out.
I spin down our development environments when they have sit idle for a period of time, not at all the same but makes me think deeper about the entire concept.
Update: This is a really cool website. I see some fun projects here too that I could have my kids work on!
It’s nearly 20 years old. Originally a Belgian site only available on the .be domain.
His blog got integrated in an other website for a while but then came back to www.lowtech.be after some years.
On that site: Communal Luxury: The Public Bathhouse - Throughout history, people have bathed in public rather than in private. Should we bring back the public bathhouse for the sake of sustainability?
The max amount of people I want in a bathtub is 2.
Eh… a bath house != Bath tub
Bath houses still exist in Japan and a bunch of other countries. They don’t feel thaaaat weird after the initial shock wears off.
after the initial shock wears off.
Your shock or mine? The problem is akin to females that protest the patriarchy by taking off their clothes in public. I never seems to be any of the beautiful people.
Other people don’t exist for our entertainment or amusement. If a “not beautiful” person wants to be naked, that’s their choice.
Fire hazard…?
Yeah, I’m not sure what relation that has to this solar powered website.
Btteries can catch fire. Certain types. Although one would probably not use batteries that are prone to that. Like Lithium Ion.
But why would they be talking about using batteries for their non-solar setup, which was the context.
Also it still seems like a weird concern. Again. Unless we were talking about the solar setup and they’re worried they fucked something up or something. And even still. You don’t need much battery for an rpi or whatever.
This is actually great!
Social media sites should do this. There’s never a good reason to be on [Insert Corporate Slop Social Media Website here] at 3AM.Never a good reason, like different timezones, different working/sleeping hours. Theres no better or worse hour for every single person.
It’s not like those major social media sites don’t have some kind of data center (or rent one) in every “major” (population wise) timezone they operate in. Your other arguments still hold true, but I think even then it would be better for all of us if those websites went down every now and then.
How dare you come here with your sound logic and reason that makes sense
I love Low Tech magazine! I have been reading them for years.
There are solutions like IPFS for decentralized content hosting so downtime of a primary resource is less important.
Over a period of roughly one year (351 days, from 12 December 2018 to 28 November 2019) the server was up for 95.26% of the time. This means that we were offline for 399 hours (which corresponds to 16.64 days).
Not bad at all really, at least for non-mission critical sites. I have solar and I really like it. Solar power on two barns, and a lot of my security cams run on solar. I’m not sure if it’s the formatting of this site, or the grainy pictures, but it oddly reminds me of the Trojan Room coffee pot.
I would be curious to know this uptime relative to any other self-hosted sites.
I remember Reddit and Twitter constantly suffering from uptime issues and they were far more decentralized, with modern infrastructure to match.
Is 95.2% all that far out of the realm of expectation?
Well of course you gotta think, Reddit and Twitter were also probably getting a lot more hits than Low Tech Mag 😅
The part I quoted was one of their many tries. It seems now, after changing out the solar panel and battery, that they have greatly improved over 95.2%.
95% isn’t great. I run my own servers on solar and I don’t think I’ve had more than a hourof unexpected downtime in the last 3 years, excluding the usual update reboots.
Well, the article did go on to provide better stats once they changed out the panel and battery:
Since then, the uptime has been 100% (March to September 2020), even though we have added a lot of content by making the website multilingual. This is due to the larger (brand new) battery but also to the better orientation of the smaller solar panel. The battery’s capacity will decline over time, so the higher storage capacity will make it last longer. If the uptime remains 100% through the winter 2020/2021, we will probably downgrade to a 20W solar panel.
It’s honestly impressive what you can do with under 3W of power these days
At one point in time, I was obsessed with getting a Thinkpad to the lowest power consumption possible.
I think I managed to drop it down to ~3w, with the screen and radio fully disabled.
i love this website. The articles they wrote is always interesting
I rent a server instead of hosting at home. But it includes a XMPP server. That down would be more problematic to me.
