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by DietPi 1651 days ago
It is not a Raspberry Pi, but an Olimex Olinuxino A20 Lime 2 and a 30W solar panel: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html#hardware

But yes, web hosting, especially for small/mid traffic websites has become very cheap (in power consumption and in money), especially for static websites where CDNs can be used to serve assets and static content from edge caches. A full x86 server or PC is often total overkill and a little SBC sufficient instead.

It is a dual core CPU btw, to bring the average CPU load into perspective. A very interesting project as a prove of concept, also for others to adopt in countries with unstable electricity supply and/or in relation high electricity costs :).
1 comments
berkes 1651 days ago
Did the author use a CDN? Because that's kindof cheating: you are just having another (free) service burning the electricity for you.

I assumed the solar server serves the sites directly, because of this. Maybe I was wrong.

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DietPi 1651 days ago
True, in this case it is great, somehow mandatory, that it is fully self-contained :). However, dynamic content like the current power consumption and CPU load would still need be served by the origin, or cached at the CDN with short timeouts only.

Using CDNs was more an idea/suggestion for others who take this project as an inspiration to run their own website even with small hardware, unstable electricity supply and/or expensive/limited bandwidth, where a CDN can further reduce server load and traffic. Also when speaking about efficiency of the Internet in general, using small SBCs where sufficient, a CDN usually serves assets/content much more effective, given a network where a particular edge server is usually closer to the visitor than the origin server, and hardware that is specifically designed and run for that purpose and can be assumed to be highly loaded (less wasted power consumption). So as long as one trusts a CDN, or the content is not of any security or privacy concerns, it is usually a reasonable choice to make use of it :).

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goodpoint 1651 days ago
There is no CDN, thankfully.
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