side note: with potential sub 7nm semiconductor processes, a wide amount of sophisticated chips could run on small ~solar (say 1W)
How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?
11–20 of 126 posts
Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?
#12>The owner of this website (www.lowtechmagazine.com) has banned your IP address ([redacted]) Anyone else seeing this? Looks like they allow me to access it via https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is... , but if they actually banned my IP specifically I don't really want to violate their wishes, I just wonder why I'm banned :/
Seeing as how their website is run from a low-power device, maybe your IP (range?) was submitting too many requests and they decided to ban it.
Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?
#13I feel like they could get almost 100% uptime with a lot less effort if they just put a second server on the other side of the world.
The antipode of Barcelona (where this is based) is pretty close to New Zealand.
If they put a second server there and then used a anycast IP, chances are one of the servers would be up at all times with no battery at all.
Edit: Changed multicast to anycast because for some reason my computer wants to auto-correct it. :(
Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?
#14It's an interesting exercise. In some ways it's similar to what we were doing at Satellogic: a Satellogic satellite is solar-powered, runs on batteries, and contains computers running Linux. (All of that is public; I'm not revealing anything unpublished here.) They seem to be running on a Raspberry Pi that uses two watts, so they can run Linux. But a website wouldn't have to run Linux. Contiki includes a webserver an…
Also, sustainability of a web server doesn't mean that much if you don't consider the net impact in the world. It seems to me that you could have a web server require substantially more power and still be a net benefit if it actually influences many users to consume less in their daily lives.
What is the marginal cost of the web traffic it creates and replaces? Would tuning the software and data payloads be more impactful than worrying about the server wattage?
What is the marginal cost of other user activities which it influences? Not just the website operator, but the user behaviors happening as a result of their relationship with the service? Do they stop using other less efficient services or just increase their overall footprint? Could it reduce their consumption of energy and material goods? Change their diet or travel habits...?
Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?
#15I wonder how much more efficient this would be if the content was distributed on a p2p network? I would love to get into distributed web tech. I'm not sure how much of a market there is for it though. The benefit of being able to have these scuttlebutt networks of low-power, efficient devices is a lower-overall carbon footprint for the common case of serving low-fidelity content like web pages and small applications.…
> I wonder how much more efficient this would be if the content was distributed on a p2p network?
This is pure speculation on my part, but probably much less efficient. In order to make the p2p network reliable, you'd need many more copies floating around. I also suspect that "finding" your data is more energy intense compared to basic DNS lookups.
Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?
#16I feel like they could get almost 100% uptime with a lot less effort if they just put a second server on the other side of the world. The antipode of Barcelona (where this is based) is pretty close to New Zealand. If they put a second server there and then used a anycast IP, chances are one of the servers would be up at all times with no battery at all. Edit: Changed multicast to anycast because for some reason my co…
That is an excellent idea. With three or four servers they could entirely avoid batteries.
I think you mean anycast, not multicast, but a less exotic option would be to use DNS failover, or even just round-robin DNS with no explicit failover: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/10927/using-m... https://www.nber.org/sys-admin/dns-failover.html
Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?
#17Previous Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20038619
Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?
#18I feel like they could get almost 100% uptime with a lot less effort if they just put a second server on the other side of the world. The antipode of Barcelona (where this is based) is pretty close to New Zealand. If they put a second server there and then used a anycast IP, chances are one of the servers would be up at all times with no battery at all. Edit: Changed multicast to anycast because for some reason my co…
That assumes that each location receives enough sunlight to keep the server operational for at least twelve hours a day, which doesn't sound realistic for a setup with no batteries. Three servers spaced equidistant around the world might work.
If you're going down that route anyway, you could add redundant servers at different latitudes to hedge against cloudy weather.
Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?
#19I feel like they could get almost 100% uptime with a lot less effort if they just put a second server on the other side of the world. The antipode of Barcelona (where this is based) is pretty close to New Zealand. If they put a second server there and then used a anycast IP, chances are one of the servers would be up at all times with no battery at all. Edit: Changed multicast to anycast because for some reason my co…
Multicast doesn't work on the big-I Internet.
A battery system is almost certainly easier than physical servers spread across the globe, even when you account for the cost of the battery.
Re: How Sustainable Is a Solar Powered Website?
#20side note: with potential sub 7nm semiconductor processes, a wide amount of sophisticated chips could run on small ~solar (say 1W)
You can run a fair bit of web traffic off of something like a Raspberry Pi, and you don't need a ton of battery to keep that running overnight. Heavy database driven websites probably won't be an option, but the bottleneck for static sites would likely be the Ethernet interface.
In fact that's pretty much exactly what they did. 168Wh battery pack is a small Deep Cycle SLA. A 50w Solar Panel and associated charge controllers and the like is like $80 at Harbor Freight. The whole thing is quite achievable on a budget.