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.
I love Low Tech magazine! I have been reading them for years.
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.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?
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.
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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
i love this website. The articles they wrote is always interesting
The 1% of the time it’s down, there’s always the Internet Archive or reading your own downloaded copy.
100% uptime since the last time we turned it on!
This was cool 5 years ago, now you can get solar panels and a home battery big enough to power this thing 24x7 without an issue, even if the sun was fully blacked out for a week
edit: a 40kwh battery would last with the power draw:
Power usage 2.62W
like over a year
There’s a lot of articles about supply based usage vs demand based energy production on that website. The idea that it turns off every now and then is sort of part of the authors’ intention of showing “we can live with some outages”.
This article in particular is a good one: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2017/09/how-not-to-run-a-modern-society-on-solar-and-wind-power-alone/
I think you entirelly missed the point then
I rent a server instead of hosting at home. But it includes a XMPP server. That down would be more problematic to me.
Barcelona pff… now do it in Oslo! 🤣
Still possible with big enough battery and solar panel
Or maybe another form of renewable energy?
Does anyone remember when businesses would operate their websites only during business hours and then take most of the functionality offline after hours?
I’m possibly also mis-remembering my early internet years and just talking shit.
we did have those with BBSes for sure
IIRC, the USA Social Security Administration’s website operates somewhat like this, because they seem to still do batch processing (a la mainframes) during the evening hours. As a result, they prevent people from logging in so that they don’t get interstitial data about their public pension.
The uptime looks better than GitHubs…
I know this is a typo, but I’m sad Guthub isn’t a food delivery company.
GitSub
gut pull sandwich.com
gut commit -m “ate too much”
gut push
Use a gell cell lead acid battery (the kind that go in regular UPSs). No fire hazzard, ans bonus, they can survive freezing temperatures just fine if outdoors. Downside is replacing a cheap battery every 3 years.
Appreciate the website itself, with it’s dithered low-colour PNG illustrations.
