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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t even bother to track my home setup
I host home assistant and if anything goes down I’ll notice pretty fast.
Things like Cloudflare should have that.
The uptime looks better than GitHubs…
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:
- 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.
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
doesn’t every website go down when there is no power? ;)
Only if there is no power everywhere. Some run redundancies in multiple locations.
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
edit: a 40kwh battery would last with the power draw:
Power usage 2.62W
like over a year
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: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2017/09/how-not-to-run-a-modern-society-on-solar-and-wind-power-alone/
I think you entirelly missed the point then
the chemical battery is often the most expensive and least eco part of the scheme.
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.
Lead-acid batteries work if you don’t care about weight and lithium-iron phosphate if you do
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
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!
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.
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.
It’s honestly impressive what you can do with under 3W of power these days
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.
The 1% of the time it’s down, there’s always the Internet Archive or reading your own downloaded copy.
