Submitted 3 days ago by Gekkonen@sopuli.xyz to selfhosted@lemmy.world
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power/
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.
The uptime looks better than GutHubs…
I know this is a typo, but I’m sad Guthub isn’t a food delivery company.
GitSub
A disappointment equivalent to Piefed.
Companies claiming 99.9999 uptime is an absurd goal for a SLA, and wouldn’t even survive a small internet outage like a DDoS attack or Akamai outage. I remember in the 90s selling the idea of 5 9’s - 99.999% on my resume until some manager who Interviewed me asked me to state the expected downtime. I stopped claiming that number because it’s impossible without full active redundancy in different locations and not dependent on external providers like cloudflare ever going down.
And please don’t argue maintenance windows “cover it” because that’s not how they work in the real world today.
Downtime per year:
For my home lab I’m happy my stuff is online and content I hardly lose access when there’s a power outage thanks to my ups. But if I tracked I’d be closer to 95%. Good enough but I can’t wait till I just don’t care to run anything.
I worked for a “99.999%” up time facility. No one talks about the exceptions that don’t effect that number. Some are out of our hands like weather or a knob w/ a backhoe.
Others are just made up by upper management to hit the numbers for their bonuses.
Also, any non-trivial system has failure modes that are not binary. Like, if your convertible car has the roof stuck down you can drive it, but you will be sad if it rains. So, is the car “up” or not? Similarly, if your site has writes offline for a database upgrade, but reads work fine, is it “up”?
The concept is just advertising and something that makes sense to senior management, but provides no actual useful metrics.
doesn’t every website go down when there is no power? ;)
Only if there is no power everywhere. Some run redundancies in multiple locations.
So… If there’s no power the website goes down?
I think the point is to run on solar energy. Being blackout resistant is not an end goal.
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
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 of CPU cost.
The project is called @solaradmin@solarcene.community and the account for the person running it is on a separate instance, presumably so petiole can message them about problems: @smallsolar@techhub.social.
congrats guys! we killed it!
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 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
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: …lowtechmagazine.com/…/how-not-to-run-a-modern-so…
I think you entirelly missed the point then
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
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.
the chemical battery is often the most expensive and least eco part of the scheme.
Shimitar@downonthestreet.eu 3 days ago 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.
irmadlad@lemmy.world 3 days ago 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 of course you gotta think, Reddit and Twitter were also probably getting a lot more hits than Low Tech Mag 😅
irmadlad@lemmy.world 3 days ago 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%.
“Hey look everyone! We never heard of grid scale batteries!”
Grid scale batteries are only a solution for transients, if that. Actual energy storage needs to be scalable like pumped storage hydro which accounts for 95% of all storage capacity worldwide.
Scaling means you buy 2 instead of one.
rako@tarte.nuage-libre.fr 3 days ago garage is a software project made for communal home hosting. Tech literates will talk about its S3 API but that’s the least interesting part: the most interesting is that it has been purposely built to be hosted on (actual) commodity hardware like second-hand nucs, running on flaky home power and internet and linked together through usual isps. Nodes may come up and down but the cluster withstands all of that.
Garage would be a pretty nice project to run a solar-powered mini-cluster. If sufficiently far from each other, you could even run without polluting batteries !
That’s really neat
Bismyth@piefed.social 3 days ago 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.
Chaf@slrpnk.net 3 days ago 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.
Bismyth@piefed.social 3 days ago How dare you come here with your sound logic and reason that makes sense
fullsquare@awful.systems 3 days ago Lead-acid batteries work if you don’t care about weight and lithium-iron phosphate if you do
You’re better off with the LiFePO4 batteries even if you don’t care about weight. A lead acid battery will wear out quickly when you cycle it daily. Lithium also has a higher charging efficiency, so you get more usable power from the solar panel.
fullsquare@awful.systems 3 days ago Lithium-iron is about 2x more expensive, there might be different availability and energy use during manufacture is probably higher
I host my personal site at home with a 15-min battery backup. After that, I accept the downtime. Rarely happens and I haven’t had a single complaint when it does.
Having everything open, on and available 24/7/365 sounds nice until you realize the human toll for things which aren’t that necessary and can be planned around. Down time is a good thing.
It’s honestly impressive what you can do with under 3W of power these days
stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago 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.
My brother in efficiency, let me introduce you to wiki.slrpnk.net/articles:start
A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip 3 days ago Appreciate the website itself, with it’s dithered low-colour PNG illustrations.
One of the best sites to browse on e-ink devices!
Use a gell cell lead acid battery (the kind that go in regular UPSs). No fire hazzard, ans bonus, they can survive freezing temperatures just fine if outdoors. Downside is replacing a cheap battery every 3 years.
i love this website. The articles they wrote is always interesting
The 1% of the time it’s down, there’s always the Internet Archive or reading your own downloaded copy.
Chaf@slrpnk.net 3 days ago Current uptime of over 23 weeks, not bad
A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip 3 days ago It’s summer 🤷
Fire hazard…?
Yeah, I’m not sure what relation that has to this solar powered website.
Btteries can catch fire. Certain types. Although one would probably not use batteries that are prone to that. Like Lithium Ion.
All websites go offline without power …
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.
This is sometimes still a thing. I know w 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. www.bhphotovideo.com/c/…/SHcalendar.jsp
New York State’s civil service pension/retirement system is still like this. Including holidays.
Thats so cool to know!
tracyspcy@lemmy.ml 3 days ago This actually cool.
There are solutions like IPFS for decentralized content hosting so downtime of a primary resource is less important.
Barcelona pff… now do it in Oslo! 🤣
Of course, it depends on the website. I’d be unhappy if my banking site went down for more than a day.
ihavenotv.com could go down for weeks, and I wouldn’t fret it.
slazer2au@lemmy.world 3 days ago
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.
My home server is 100% up, because I never check it and that’s how it works, right?
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
I didn’t turn it down, so it’s obviously up.
Schrödingers home server
hanke@feddit.nu 3 days ago
My home server is 100% up, because I run the checks from the same machine
jim_v@lemmy.world 3 days ago
This reminded me of this story from the start of Covid.
en.wikipedia.org/…/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Tanzania
Hospitals? Air traffic control? Power grid operators? Like these are exceptional businesses, but they’re out there.
slazer2au@lemmy.world 3 days ago
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.
ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip 3 days ago
Many airports are closed at night.
jballs@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
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 5 9s.
iknewitwhenisawit@fedinsfw.app 3 days ago
I found the GitHub employee! 😉
slazer2au@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Good news, I don’t work for microslop.
Bad news, I work for someone worse… :(
Ice@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
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.
No_Maines_Land@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
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.
slazer2au@lemmy.world 3 days ago
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.
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social 3 days ago
I host home assistant and if anything goes down I’ll notice pretty fast.
Things like Cloudflare should have that.