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My solar-powered and self-hosted website

(dri.es)
192 points lightlyused | 1 comments | 17 Oct 24 10:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.2s | source
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IncreasePosts ◴[18 Oct 24 17:17 UTC] No.41881461[source]▶
Solar powered sites are cool and fun, but I find it ultimately lacking because so much of the rest of the networking infrastructure is reliant on the grid. It would be more energy efficient to just host the static site on cloudflare or whatever, and use the solar panel to charge some batteries, or something you would normally use the grid for. I suspect overall energy usage would be even lower if the site was hosted on a CDN, due to the CDN operators keeping their machines near full utilization, and fewer network hops required for an average request.
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genter ◴[18 Oct 24 17:39 UTC] No.41881698[source]▶
You don't like that the rest of the infrastructure is on the grid, so you're proposing moving the site to the grid too?
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1. ejddhbrbrrnrn ◴[19 Oct 24 00:37 UTC] No.41884699[source]▶
Yes it is not a contradiction here.

Economies of scale make cloud more efficient for basic sites like this. It is like using street lights vs. every house putting out a few candles.

In addition we love the grid! We want it to get greener. Put the effort into making the grid energy zero carbon, low pollution while still highly available.

Furthermore using that solar to say charge your work laptop and then hosting the site in CF would net use less energy.