31–40 of 64 posts
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
They do a lot of other sustainable web development[0] practices like letting you read offline, having incredibly small page sizes (always shown in the lower left corner), and dithering all their images[1] (which imo creates a cool effect)
[0] https://sustainablewebdesign.org/
[1] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/#h...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
except all of this could be used hardware and panels. no need to buy new.
Buying used also only works when not that many people are doing it. On an individual level, it is a good thing to do, but it isn't a solution. It does help foster an environment of maintaining and supporting hardware for longer, which is a better solution.
I could envision a scenario where solar self-hosters replace hardware at a rate so much lower than than hosting companies that it outweighs the additional hardware it requires, but I don't think it is the current reality.
Shame the solar panels can't do "self-healing". I this this is cool, I know a couple folks who got homelabs on reddit who mainly use solar power due to the cost and want to go green.
This is so cool! I'm so surprised I've never heard of someone doing this before :)
No, it won't be the most efficient, but it's yours.
Solar 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…
It's be neat to have a digital ocean or equivalent that allows locating in data centers by energy source.
Shame the solar panels can't do "self-healing". I this this is cool, I know a couple folks who got homelabs on reddit who mainly use solar power due to the cost and want to go green.
You can get self healing solar power if you grow bamboo and use the resulting charcoal for fuel. Carbon neutral I guess.
Granted I doubt you could "farm" bamboo like trees or other plant. Given how fast section species of bamboo can grow, which is a big benefit in this hypothetical, you would probably need a ton of water and no matter how nutrient rich the soil is you'd probably deplete the soil after a few harvests.
Shame considering how fast growing and dense bamboo is.
controversial take: but I think it's fine to host stuff on your own machines, rather than the massive big-data hyperscale datacenters. Yes, google/cloudflare/AWS might be more efficient per watt, but I don't like giving them more money to continue to violate privacy/TOS/labor... (AI, kiwifarms, &, well, everything amazon does). No, it won't be the most efficient, but it's yours.
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.
The author clearly explains in the post: > When I started this solar-powered website project, I wasn't trying to revolutionize sustainable computing or drastically cut my electricity bill. I was driven by curiosity, a desire to have fun, and a hope that my journey might inspire others to explore local-first or solar-powered hosting. > The cost savings? Looking at our last electricity bill, we pay an average of $0.325…