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.
“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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
deleted by creator
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%.
Well of course you gotta think, Reddit and Twitter were also probably getting a lot more hits than Low Tech Mag 😅
I love Low Tech magazine! I have been reading them for years.
Fire hazard…?
100% uptime since the last time we turned it on!
works every time half of the time!
Well… Sorta works half the time, but we deleted the bad reviews
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 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 pushgut checkout -b 💩
i love this website. The articles they wrote is always interesting
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
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
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
The 1% of the time it’s down, there’s always the Internet Archive or reading your own downloaded copy.
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.
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
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.”
I didn’t turn it down, so it’s obviously up.
Schrödingers home server
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t even bother to track my home setup
I host home assistant and if anything goes down I’ll notice pretty fast.
