This site is now solar powered
Before today my site was hosted in a big datacenter, along with millions of other servers; today, as i was giving wifi connection to a chinese trailcam I thought: could I self host my website on this tiny Raspberry Pi Zero? So people going to www dot tomcooks dot com would be routed straight to this minuscule board in the middle of nowhere?
This board is undersized (to be verified) for the dockerized Hugo setup i used to run my site on, but for the time being it can easily serve the generated static files with a small webserver.
I created a small VPN so that requests from the web can be tunneled through a residential wifi staight to the raspberry in the woods; the connection is flakey at times because the wifi hotspot is far away, and RAM is scarce so when there are many concurrent visitors things slow down a bit and page loading times are between 5-10 seconds; but it seems to work reasonably okay for now, should it become unresponsive or unreachable my old server will kick in as fallback.
Moreover, this board is connected to a DC outlet powered by solar panels during the daytime; this board consumes about half a watt on average so it’s more about the technical achievement rather than the ecological or economical advancement, but it feels nice to self host both content and electricity.
Less “slow web” talk and more weekend soldering.
Next steps
- find some slicker static site generator that is not as resource intensive as hugo
- secure a solar panel and battery solely for this site
- implement some data tracking to check how the site is doing, how much it consumes, how much battery left, etc.
- experiment with even smaller boards that require even less electricity
Do you want in?
Would you be interested in a similar setup? Maybe you’re ecology conscious, maybe you hate datacenters, maybe you want to begin to put your money were your mouth is? Contact me and I give you good price good solar good serverino you pay now you pay cheap you pay good ok - ciao