I don’t thinks this page is ugly at all.

What more important to me is that it loads quickly.

Oh, that makes me think of another interesting angle: Designing pages to minimize energy consumption on the client device. Of course, that probably reduces server load at the same time for some things - fewer bytes moved over the network helps both sides - but also includes things like less complex CSS/JS.

The part that bothers me a bit is that the website doesn’t actually do anything useful - there isn’t really any content. I guess one could argue that the proof of concept of a solar powered server is interesting enough to justify the site’s existence - but Low Tech Magazine has already had a solar-powered version for years AND they actually host interesting content.

If someone hosts a solar-powered website that doesn’t do anything useful, is that really helping the environment? Or is it just contributing to e-waste when the parts eventually fail? And does it really have a smaller environmental footprint than just hosting a site at Neocities or something?

That being said I recognize that this is just someone’s little hobby project, and they are more than welcome to build fun little projects like this and share them if they like. My comments are more directed at a general tendency of techies to engage consumerism under the guise of environmentalism.

The horror of someone making something for fun!

As I said, “they are more than welcome to build fun little projects like this and share them if they like”.

But if they are going to imply that this is more environmentally friendly than hosting a site in a data center…

> Data centers and servers traditionally consume large amounts of data [I assume they mean energy?]. But this lightweight solar powered website relies only on energy from the sun.

… then I think it is fair game to examine those claims.

Shut up climate science denier /s

In all likelihood, I'd say their claims are right-ish. The caveats are:

* has their PV cell been made in such a way as to ever reclaim its embodied energy? Smaller panels tend not to achieve this over their lifetimes, larger ones do. * data centres _where_? If we are talking data centres that feed heat into a district heating system as part of its cooling, then probably not. Free cooled or air conditioned systems probably lose, though.

There's also the matter of designing for a limited medium: over time there's a (very difficult to quantify) carbon saving from serving a site that is small and cacheable vs running some monster SPA with a RoR back end. Think computation-per-request

So.. maybe? It is an apples and apples comparison, but we're not specifying which kind clearly enough.

I’m assuming static content hosted on some serverless architecture (so you’re not reserving CPU cycles when nobody is actually using the site), where the host is able to optimize things pretty heavily.

I’m also assuming that the data center gets a significant amount of their energy from renewable sources. Google, for example, offsets 100% of their energy usage with renewable energy. [1]

[1] https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/cleanenergy/

Probably good, but again, heat reclamation vs free cooling vs AC also matters. In terms of environmental impact, where the heat goes is of enormous consequence. If Google are using AC, they're raising energy demand and therefore lengthening the road to decarbonisation. If they are using free cooling, that's sort of OK. If they're pumping heat to people's houses, that's fantastic as it displaces their heat demands.

No dispute here that economies of scale apply on the compute side.

More on data centre heat reclamation:

https://www.danfoss.com/en/markets/buildings-commercial/shar...

At least write a blog report and show off your internal profit!

I’m not the creator of the project.

"Ok, but... what is your business model? What about monetization?"

Now only if they could demo a k8s cluster on a solar-powered RPI full rack with high-availability hosting a multiplayer game and show rolling software update to v2.

I would have been happy with just a detailed writeup of how it works, what components they used, how much it costs, etc.

It would be much more energy efficient to just serve the page from some static hosting like GitHub pages where the server is already running and when no one is requesting your page, it uses 0w rather than having to run a full OS constantly.

That way you also avoid the creation of a battery, computer, and solar panels to host a few MB of files.

Given the off-grid mentality that often comes with solar power enthusiasts, hosting on a computer in a different city sort of puts you back on-grid. I like to imagine that the maintainer is also talking to their friends about mesh networking.

For a hobby, sure. Its fun and novel while a few documents sitting on S3 is boring. But from a practical and environmental standpoint, it's purely worse. The OP link is currently dead while I've never seen github pages down after years of using it.

As hobbies go, I think it's practical. There are applications where handling things in the cloud just isn't an option. Many of them are also cases where you don't have reliable power.

From a practical standpoint Open-Source software is often also a hard sell, if you ignore the value of the gained freedom. This linked project isn't much different from someone running Gentoo with Libreboot and a custom kernel. Is it necessary or practical? Maybe not. Environmentally friendly to recompile everything? Nope. But that person probably learned a lot in the process and had some fun with it.

> I've never seen github pages down after years of using it.

Sure, though with those services the actual uptime doesn't exceed the user account's lifetime.

Given the amount of useful information provided by this website, it would be most efficient to write “Battery: 95%” and “* battery level may be incorrect” on a sheet of paper and “host” it in a drawer somewhere.

Is it promoting energy efficiency though?

Surely the actual intent is literally "because we could" like so many other things?

> They make it seem like the only way to be energy efficient is to give up all amenities, including aesthetics.

I, including the proponents of such sites, think that this sort of aesthetic is pretty great.

Not aesthetics, but we will probably have to ditch the multi megabyte SPAs. That'd be lovely, actually.