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A solar powered website that goes offline when there's no power (solar.lowtechmagazine.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 104 points 1 month ago (24 children)

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.

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  • [–] 94 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    My home server is 100% up, because I never check it and that's how it works, right?

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

    This reminds me of a news story from the start of Covid.

    Tanzanian President, "We have zero bases of Covid!"

    Rest of the Earth, "Cool beans! How did you do it‽"

    Tanzany Prez, "Easy, we just didn't test for it."

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Tanzania

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  • [–] 24 points 1 month ago (6 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago

    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.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    I found the GitHub employee! 😉

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    There are plentiful scenarios where 10 minutes of sequential downtime would be a critical issue. Say you're a telecoms or internet provider - even a one minute delay to a life-saving message can be enough for someone to die.

    Furthermore, lots of things are interconnected now. Your business might be able to handle 10 minutes of downtime, but lets say my business relies on 12 different service providers like you, who each have 10 minutes of downtime during a week using your rationale. That could up being 2hrs of downtime each week.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    99.999% is about 5 minutes and 16 seconds of downtime per year.

    12 services down perfectly sequentially works out to 76 minutes per year, not 2hours per week.

    Not saying there aren't applications where that can't be catastrophic, but you're scale is off for three 9 downtime.

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