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.
* 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 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]
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...
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.