Here Comes the Sun (And My Website)

Whatever happened to the early internet? Do you remember the blink tag, low-resolution animated GIFs, color contrasts that nearly made your eyes bleed, and the wild fonts? I am not suggesting in any way that we go back to some of those awful practices, but there was a certain charm about them. Everything was new, and a standard way of doing things and delivering content had not yet been worked out. It was the new Wild West, and you never knew what you might come across next. The early internet was nothing if not interesting.

Nowadays things are very different. You want to build a website? OK, first create an account with a cloud services provider. Check. Then download a commonly used development framework. Check. Next, pick a popular theme for your website from a list of options used by thousands of other sites — and make sure you sprinkle in plenty of generic stock images. Check.

Blah! Where is the excitement? The internet used to be digital Cap'n Crunch, and now we have turned it into Corn Flakes! Dries Buytaert recently took on a project that could reclaim at least a little bit of the freedom of the early internet. Rather than going with a standard cloud-based hosting solution, he showed how you can run a solar-powered Raspberry Pi-based server to do your own thing and serve up whatever sort of content you want — although no blink tag is required. You could run a perfectly boring website with this setup if you choose. But running a web server on your roof does cry out for something more interesting, in my humble opinion.

The server runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W single-board computer. These are reasonably powerful little machines, so — unless you are getting a lot of traffic — it will handle the job quite nicely. Importantly, these computers also consume very little power, which is essential if you want to maintain uptime while running on energy collected from a small solar panel on your rooftop (in this case, a 50-watt panel from Voltaic was used). For times when the sun is not shining, Buytaert also included an 18 amp-hour lithium iron phosphate battery to keep things running.

Even with a battery that can run the Raspberry Pi for about a week, the website is not entirely stable and does go offline at times. It is not clear if this is due to a lack of solar energy, or if media attention has simply overwhelmed the modest resources of the little computer powering the server. In any case, there is a dashboard available that tracks the site’s uptime, and it does not rely on the rooftop server for operation.

Is this a good option for a website that is mission-critical and must have near-perfect uptime? Absolutely not. Is it a fun project and a new way to think about hosting websites in an energy-efficient manner? Definitely.

Looking ahead, Buytaert is considering ways to upgrade the power delivery system in advance of a cold Boston winter, which might otherwise bring it to its knees. He is also considering some upgrades to the software stack. If you want to dig into more details before bringing up your own server, you might want to check out the project write-up for some help first.