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 this website. The articles they wrote is always interesting
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.
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.
we did have those with BBSes for sure
New York State’s civil service pension/retirement system is still like this. Including holidays.
This is sometimes still a thing. I know of at least one religious news organisation that takes the website offline on Sundays.
B&H Photo will not process your order on the Jewish day of rest, it’s amazing. https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/httwww.bhphotovideo.com/find/SHcalendar.jsp
I rent a server instead of hosting at home. But it includes a XMPP server. That down would be more problematic to me.
I have never been a fan of anything above 3 nines of uptime even in a business situation.
Your business will not collapse because of 10 min of downtime a week, and if it does that is not technologies fault.
I don’t even bother to track my home setup.
I don’t even bother to track my home setup
I host home assistant and if anything goes down I’ll notice pretty fast.
I found the GitHub employee! 😉
Good news, I don’t work for microslop.
Bad news, I work for someone worse… :(Slopbook?
Na, they are one of our customers.
Your business will not collapse because of 10 min of downtime a week, and if it does that is not technologies fault.
Hospitals? Air traffic control? Power grid operators? Like these are exceptional businesses, but they’re out there.
Many airports are closed at night.
Good point, but that’s planned downtime.
Those do actually go down. Hospitals have to be evacuated after an earthquake, airports force all aircraft to divert or the grid has the sort of outage that gets it’s own Wikipedia page and needs to be black started.
Those do actually go down.
That’s the point I’m making: when those examples go down unplanned, in particular hospitals and the power grid, in particular the examples you gave, those can be catastrophic events. I.e., if we ignore planned downtime, then these businesses really need five lines of reliability during the times they are expected to be up.
I agree with the overall point that the average business doesn’t need five nines of availability, but I wanted to point out that there are definitely businesses that do.
My brother is an air traffic at one of the world’s busiest international airports and I can assure your their system uptime is no where close to 3 9s.
I agree, but the number of business that have actual need for extreme uptime is insignificant compared to the number of businesses that don’t but think for some stupid reason they do.
There are plentiful scenarios where 10 minutes of sequential downtime would be a critical issue. Say you’re a telecoms or internet provider - even a one minute delay to a life-saving message can be enough for someone to die.
Furthermore, lots of things are interconnected now. Your business might be able to handle 10 minutes of downtime, but lets say my business relies on 12 different service providers like you, who each have 10 minutes of downtime during a week using your rationale. That could up being 2hrs of downtime each week.
99.999% is about 5 minutes and 16 seconds of downtime per year.
12 services down perfectly sequentially works out to 76 minutes per year, not 2hours per week.
Not saying there aren’t applications where that can’t be catastrophic, but you’re scale is off for three 9 downtime.
His comment was not based on three nines, the OP is the one that brought up 10 min a week
Yes, there are some that do, I should have said that. But the number of orgs that need extreme uptime is so small compared to business that think they do need it but really don’t.
Oh for sure. Not everyone is cloudflare.
Things like Cloudflare should have that.
My home server is 100% up, because I never check it and that’s how it works, right?
My home server is 100% up, because I run the checks from the same machine
I didn’t turn it down, so it’s obviously up.
Schrödingers home server
This reminds me of a news story from the start of Covid.
Tanzanian President, “We have zero bases of Covid!”
Rest of the Earth, “Cool beans! How did you do it‽”
Tanzany Prez, “Easy, we just didn’t test for it.”
Trump: “If you stop the testing, the cases will go down. Drink bleach! UV buttplugs!”
USA: “Let’s try another dangerously old guy for a bit, but if eggs are too expensive after a few years we’ll give this guy another shot.”
There’s a nifty project on Mastodon where someone is running an instance entirely on solar (and I think a battery?). They’ve been tinkering with some of the code to do things like optimise images for reduced weight or CPU cost.
The project is called @solaradmin@solarcene.community and the account for the person running it is on a separate instance, presumably so people can message them about problems: @smallsolar@techhub.social.
congrats guys! we killed it!
deleted by creator
the chemical battery is often the most expensive and least eco part of the scheme.
I think you entirelly missed the point then
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/
A 40Kwh battery is like 10 grand, I’m not sure why you brought that up. I’d be more likely to invest in a second battery and solar panel. It’s been up for over 23 weeks right now, I’d guess a second solar panel and battery could keeping it up nearly 100% of the time, and it’d cost under $100 for a 200wh battery and 30w panel.
Now they can get better hardware, but should they? They take seriously the low tech part, and part of being low tech is fighting against consumerism culture and keeping with what they have, which is wotking fine
I love Low Tech magazine! I have been reading them for years.
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 😅
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.
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%.
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.
The 1% of the time it’s down, there’s always the Internet Archive or reading your own downloaded copy.
Barcelona pff… now do it in Oslo! 🤣
Still possible with big enough battery and solar panel
There are solutions like IPFS for decentralized content hosting so downtime of a primary resource is less important.
Uptime for home users is useless. More important is recovery, reboot and resume (the 3’Rs)
You server should reboot automatically, storage should restore itself from unsafe shutdown and your services should resume operations like nothing happened.
This means test your reboot, ensure stuff doesn’t break, and so on.
Failing storage after an hard reboot is the hardest.
For network, i have two ISP connections and a an auto switch script Incase one goes down. But honestly it’s overkill and not needed for 99% of home hosters.
Buying some kind of UPS like a battery powered power strip is also nice but keep in mind that require maintenance to replace batteries once every few years (long enough to forget) and so be useless. The ups shall only last enough to perform a controlled server shutdown using NUTS.
Current uptime of over 23 weeks, not bad
It’s late summer now, best possible time to measure solar-powered uptime. Roughly 5 months, i.e. since mid March, i.e. springtime in Spain. Many daylight hours.
My brother in efficiency, let me introduce you to https://wiki.slrpnk.net/articles:start
