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A solar powered website that goes offline when there's no power (solar.lowtechmagazine.com)
submitted 1 day ago by Gekkonen@sopuli.xyz to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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.

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[-] irmadlad@lemmy.world 13 points 20 hours 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.

[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 points 19 hours ago

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?

[-] ikidd@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 19 hours ago

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.

[-] irmadlad@lemmy.world 6 points 18 hours ago

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.

[-] irmadlad@lemmy.world 2 points 18 hours 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%.

[-] kestrel7_7@lemmy.world 1 points 17 hours ago

Well of course you gotta think, Reddit and Twitter were also probably getting a lot more hits than Low Tech Mag 😅

this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2026
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