"Hey look everyone! We never heard of grid scale batteries!"
this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2026
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doesn’t every website go down when there is no power? ;)
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.
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!
I love Low Tech magazine! I have been reading them for years.
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
Fire hazard...?
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.
I would be curious to know this uptime relative to any other self-hosted sites.
I remember Reddit and Twitter constantly suffering from uptime issues and they were far more decentralized, with modern infrastructure to match.
Is 95.2% all that far out of the realm of expectation?
Well of course you gotta think, Reddit and Twitter were also probably getting a lot more hits than Low Tech Mag 😅
The part I quoted was one of their many tries. It seems now, after changing out the solar panel and battery, that they have greatly improved over 95.2%.
95% isn't great. I run my own servers on solar and I don't think I've had more than a hourof unexpected downtime in the last 3 years, excluding the usual update reboots.
Well, the article did go on to provide better stats once they changed out the panel and battery:
Since then, the uptime has been 100% (March to September 2020), even though we have added a lot of content by making the website multilingual. This is due to the larger (brand new) battery but also to the better orientation of the smaller solar panel. The battery’s capacity will decline over time, so the higher storage capacity will make it last longer. If the uptime remains 100% through the winter 2020/2021, we will probably downgrade to a 20W solar panel.
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.
i love this website. The articles they wrote is always interesting
There are solutions like IPFS for decentralized content hosting so downtime of a primary resource is less important.
100% uptime since the last time we turned it on!
works every time half of the time!
The 1% of the time it's down, there's always the Internet Archive or reading your own downloaded copy.
The uptime looks better than GitHubs...
I know this is a typo, but I'm sad Guthub isn't a food delivery company.
GitSub
gut pull sandwich.com
gut commit -m "ate too much"
gut push
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
Now they can get better hardware, but should they? They take seriously the low tech part, and part of being low tech is fighting against consumerism culture and keeping with what they have, which is wotking fine
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
Does anyone remember when businesses would operate their websites only during business hours and then take most of the functionality offline after hours?
I'm possibly also mis-remembering my early internet years and just talking shit.
This is sometimes still a thing. I know of at least one religious news organisation that takes the website offline on Sundays.
B&H Photo will not process your order on the Jewish day of rest, it's amazing. https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/httwww.bhphotovideo.com/find/SHcalendar.jsp
we did have those with BBSes for sure
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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.
My home server is 100% up, because I never check it and that's how it works, right?
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."
My home server is 100% up, because I run the checks from the same machine
I didn't turn it down, so it's obviously up.
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I found the GitHub employee! 😉
Good news, I don't work for microslop.
Bad news, I work for someone worse... :(
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Appreciate the website itself, with it's dithered low-colour PNG illustrations.
One of the best sites to browse on e-ink devices!
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