This is cool, but I mean... come on. This guy lives in a $2M apt in a big city.
The amount of energy being "saved" yearly is wasted almost every second.
My solar-powered and self-hosted website
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Re: My solar-powered and self-hosted website
#12This is cool, but I mean... come on. This guy lives in a $2M apt in a big city. The amount of energy being "saved" yearly is wasted almost every second.
How does it help the discourse to bring this up? Would you like it if someone inserted this kind of (irrelevant) and unsubstantiated information when commenting on an article you wrote?
Re: My solar-powered and self-hosted website
#13Solar powered sites are cool and fun, but I find it ultimately lacking because so much of the rest of the networking infrastructure is reliant on the grid. It would be more energy efficient to just host the static site on cloudflare or whatever, and use the solar panel to charge some batteries, or something you would normally use the grid for. I suspect overall energy usage would be even lower if the site was hosted…
You don't like that the rest of the infrastructure is on the grid, so you're proposing moving the site to the grid too?
Re: My solar-powered and self-hosted website
#14This is cool, but I mean... come on. This guy lives in a $2M apt in a big city. The amount of energy being "saved" yearly is wasted almost every second.
I can't speak for his specific apartment, but apartments in general are more energy efficient that a suburban house. New York City is one of the lowest per capita CO2 emissions in the US.
Re: My solar-powered and self-hosted website
#15This is so cool! I'm so surprised I've never heard of someone doing this before :)
Re: My solar-powered and self-hosted website
#16Solar powered sites are cool and fun, but I find it ultimately lacking because so much of the rest of the networking infrastructure is reliant on the grid. It would be more energy efficient to just host the static site on cloudflare or whatever, and use the solar panel to charge some batteries, or something you would normally use the grid for. I suspect overall energy usage would be even lower if the site was hosted…
Agreed. When I see this type of thing, I am always turned off by people describing it as "greener" or “more sustainable”. Every small website having its own solar panel and hardware is not greener. People frequently think only of the carbon emissions of the energy used by the hardware once it's running, ignoring the carbon (and raw material) cost of building that hardware.
Serving websites is an area where capitalism’s promise of achieving efficiency of resource utilization through economic incentives probably actually works, via shared hardware.
This is a hobby and aesthetic thing, which is valid and interesting.
If anyone has some good data about carbon emissions of self-hosted vs shared hardware I’d love to see it.
Re: My solar-powered and self-hosted website
#17Cool project, but also a great all around tutorial - the appendix section is a nice idea and very helpful for many people I'm sure.
Re: My solar-powered and self-hosted website
#18How many more panels/bigger battery would your need to move the switch and other required home infra to run the site?
Re: My solar-powered and self-hosted website
#19Solar powered sites are cool and fun, but I find it ultimately lacking because so much of the rest of the networking infrastructure is reliant on the grid. It would be more energy efficient to just host the static site on cloudflare or whatever, and use the solar panel to charge some batteries, or something you would normally use the grid for. I suspect overall energy usage would be even lower if the site was hosted…
You don't like that the rest of the infrastructure is on the grid, so you're proposing moving the site to the grid too?
He's looking at it from a utilitarian point of view.
From that perspective, you've got a finite amount of energy that's being consumed at any point of time and by that logic, you'd be better served to use the solar energy for something else in your household that would've needed the grid, because a cloud provider will almost certainly only need a fraction of the electricity you'd need to keep the static files served.
So, by doing that you've effectively reduced your absolute energy footprint.
But these projects aren't about reducing your energy footprint. They're about having a local webserver that's running on solar energy. Or in the authors words: At its heart, this project is about learning and contributing to a conversation on a greener, local-first future for the web
Re: My solar-powered and self-hosted website
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't like that the rest of the infrastructure is on the grid, so you're proposing moving the site to the grid too?
He's looking at it from a utilitarian point of view. From that perspective, you've got a finite amount of energy that's being consumed at any point of time and by that logic, you'd be better served to use the solar energy for something else in your household that would've needed the grid, because a cloud provider will almost certainly only need a fraction of the electricity you'd need to keep the static files served.…
Yeah, it’s cool to just see what goes into it, and get a more intuitive understanding of the tradeoffs and what needs to be done to move more of this to green energy. It makes the (large) challenge of matching generation to consumption a whole lot more real. It’s obviously not meant to be a maximized carbon reduction in any way commensurate to the effort.