I host my personal site at home with a 15-min battery backup. After that, I accept the downtime. Rarely happens and I haven’t had a single complaint when it does.
this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2026
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Having everything open, on and available 24/7/365 sounds nice until you realize the human toll for things which aren’t that necessary and can be planned around. Down time is a good thing.
Of course, it depends on the website. I'd be unhappy if my banking site went down for more than a day.
ihavenotv.com could go down for weeks, and I wouldn't fret it.
doesn’t every website go down when there is no power? ;)
I think the point is to run on solar energy. Being blackout resistant is not an end goal.
Edit: Ohh you're talking about the post title lol
Only if there is no power everywhere. Some run redundancies in multiple locations.
So.... You're saying that if there's no power the website goes down.
Cute, even if deeply impractical for most server applications.
We need more of those weird enthusiast projects around, and we need to hear of them.
Still, going all green and then selling sets of four physical books is a little odd.
"Hey look everyone! We never heard of grid scale batteries!"
This website is like 10 years old from memory, well before grid-scale batteries were widespread (well they still aren't in many countries).
Grid scale batteries are only a solution for transients, if that. Actual energy storage needs to be scalable like pumped storage hydro which accounts for 95% of all storage capacity worldwide.
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.
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.
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100% uptime since the last time we turned it on!
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.
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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!
It's nearly 20 years old. Originally a Belgian site only available on the .be domain.
His blog got integrated in an other website for a while but then came back to www.lowtech.be after some years.
On that site: Communal Luxury: The Public Bathhouse - Throughout history, people have bathed in public rather than in private. Should we bring back the public bathhouse for the sake of sustainability?
The max amount of people I want in a bathtub is 2.
Eh.. a bath house != Bath tub
Bath houses still exist in Japan and a bunch of other countries. They don't feel thaaaat weird after the initial shock wears off.
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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.
Things like Cloudflare should have that.
My home server is 100% up, because I never check it and that's how it works, right?
My home server is 100% up, because I run the checks from the same machine
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."
Trump: "If you stop the testing, the cases will go down. Drink bleach! UV buttplugs!"
USA: "Let's try another dangerously old guy for a bit, but if eggs are too expensive after a few years we'll give this guy another shot."
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I love Low Tech magazine! I have been reading them for years.
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