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.
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… You’re saying that 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.
Edit: Ohh you’re talking about the post title lol
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.
My brother in efficiency, let me introduce you to https://wiki.slrpnk.net/articles:start
“Hey look everyone! We never heard of grid scale batteries!”
This website is like 10 years old from memory, well before grid-scale batteries were widespread (well they still aren’t in many countries).
Right, and I’m older than the Sony Walkman and that’s why I never heard about “internet”.
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.
That is literally the opposite definition to scalable. Scalable things don’t require twice the resources for twice the capacity.
Buy two instead of one is exactly the worst case scalability you can have.
95% of the world grid storage capacity is pumped storage hydro and batteries will literally never be able to compete because water is the cheapest energy storage medium we could possibly have at grid scale. North America was the world leader on PSH in the 1970-2000 but now China is eating our lunch and our governments no longer have the ability to start real infrastructure projects because of crony capitalism.
I can’t believe we’re watching China become the world leader in renewables while we pretend like batteries are a smart way of storing GWhs of power because that’s the most profitable solution to the private sector.
Enjoy your water.
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.
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.
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.
How dare you come here with your sound logic and reason that makes sense
Interesting concept. I haven’t seen lowtechmagazine before, going to have to definitely check it out.
I spin down our development environments when they have sit idle for a period of time, not at all the same but makes me think deeper about the entire concept.
Update: This is a really cool website. I see some fun projects here too that I could have my kids work on!
It’s nearly 20 years old. Originally a Belgian site only available on the .be domain.
His blog got integrated in an other website for a while but then came back to www.lowtech.be after some years.
On that site: Communal Luxury: The Public Bathhouse - Throughout history, people have bathed in public rather than in private. Should we bring back the public bathhouse for the sake of sustainability?
The max amount of people I want in a bathtub is 2.
Eh… a bath house != Bath tub
Bath houses still exist in Japan and a bunch of other countries. They don’t feel thaaaat weird after the initial shock wears off.
after the initial shock wears off.
Your shock or mine? The problem is akin to females that protest the patriarchy by taking off their clothes in public. I never seems to be any of the beautiful people.
Other people don’t exist for our entertainment or amusement. If a “not beautiful” person wants to be naked, that’s their choice.
I don’t preclude them, I’m just expressing my taste.
I love Low Tech magazine! I have been reading them for years.
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.
But why would they be talking about using batteries for their non-solar setup, which was the context.
Also it still seems like a weird concern. Again. Unless we were talking about the solar setup and they’re worried they fucked something up or something. And even still. You don’t need much battery for an rpi or whatever.
They were saying they were concerned about fire risk with their non-battery setup. They brought up this setup as if it’d alleviate that risk.
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.
Cute, even if deeply impractical for most server applications.
We need more of those weird enthusiast projects around, and we need to hear of them.
Still, going all green and then selling sets of four physical books is a little odd.
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.
Things like Cloudflare should have that.
My home server is 100% up, because I never check it and that’s how it works, right?
My home server is 100% up, because I run the checks from the same machine
This reminds me of a news story from the start of Covid.
Tanzanian President, “We have zero bases of Covid!”
Rest of the Earth, “Cool beans! How did you do it‽”
Tanzany Prez, “Easy, we just didn’t test for it.”
Trump: “If you stop the testing, the cases will go down. Drink bleach! UV buttplugs!”
USA: “Let’s try another dangerously old guy for a bit, but if eggs are too expensive after a few years we’ll give this guy another shot.”
I didn’t turn it down, so it’s obviously up.
Your business will not collapse because of 10 min of downtime a week, and if it does that is not technologies fault.
Hospitals? Air traffic control? Power grid operators? Like these are exceptional businesses, but they’re out there.
My brother is an air traffic controller at one of the world’s busiest international airports and I can assure your their system uptime is no where close to 3 9s.
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.
Many airports are closed at night.
Good point, but that’s planned downtime.
Those do actually go down. Hospitals have to be evacuated after an earthquake, airports force all aircraft to divert or the grid has the sort of outage that gets it’s own Wikipedia page and needs to be black started.
Those do actually go down.
That’s the point I’m making: when those examples go down unplanned, in particular hospitals and the power grid, in particular the examples you gave, those can be catastrophic events. I.e., if we ignore planned downtime, then these businesses really need five lines of reliability during the times they are expected to be up.
I agree with the overall point that the average business doesn’t need five nines of availability, but I wanted to point out that there are definitely businesses that do.
I found the GitHub employee! 😉
Good news, I don’t work for microslop.
Bad news, I work for someone worse… :(Slopbook?
Na, they are one of our customers.
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.
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.
His comment was not based on three nines, the OP is the one that brought up 10 min a week
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.
Oh for sure. Not everyone is cloudflare.
I don’t even bother to track my home setup
I host home assistant and if anything goes down I’ll notice pretty fast.
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:
- 99% ~3.65 days (5,256 min)
- 99.9% ~8.77 hours (526 min)
- 99.99% ~52.6 min
- 99.999% ~5.26 min
- 99.9999% ~31.5 seconds
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.
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
