Most of the internet is built never to sleep. Two projects take the opposite approach, and they changed how I think about this site.
“Always on” is so normal that it’s easy to forget it’s a choice. Behind it are data centres with backup generators, redundant cooling and power drawn whether anyone is reading or not. For a bank, that makes sense. For a library of gardening notes and radio projects, it’s worth asking whether the page really has to be there at 3 a.m. on the fourth rainy day in a row. These two projects asked that question seriously, and their answers are more interesting than “yes.”
Low-tech Magazine
Low-tech Magazine serves a solar-powered edition of its website from a small server. The pages are deliberately light, images are dithered to shrink them, and a battery reading on the page shows how much charge is left. When there hasn’t been enough sun for long enough, the site goes offline, and that’s accepted instead of engineered away.
When the editors described the setup in 2018, the server was a single-board computer drawing between 1 and 2.5 watts depending on how many people were visiting, about what a phone charger uses. They set a target of 90% uptime, which works out to the site being offline roughly 35 days a year, mostly in winter. They didn’t hide that number. They put it in the article.
The dithered images are part of the same idea. Instead of full-colour photographs, the site shows images reduced to a handful of colours and a pattern of dots. They’re a fraction of the size, they load fast on a slow connection, and they have their own look, a little like a printed newsletter. The constraint became the style.
Solar Protocol
Solar Protocol is a network of small solar-powered servers hosted by volunteers in different places. When you visit, you’re sent to whichever server has the most sunlight right then. The website follows the sun around the world.
The project, led by Tega Brain, Alex Nathanson and Benedetta Piantella and kept running by volunteer stewards, calls itself “a naturally intelligent network programmed by the sun.” As each server’s panels move into daylight or darkness it becomes active or goes quiet, and the site adjusts the quality of its images to the battery level of whichever server is answering. There’s no central data centre deciding where traffic goes. The weather decides.
That’s a different answer to the uptime problem from Low-tech Magazine’s. Instead of one server accepting that it will sometimes sleep, many small servers take turns, so somewhere it’s always day.
What they have in common
Both projects make the energy visible. A battery gauge on the page, or a note telling you which city’s sun you’re reading by, turns an invisible cost into something you can see. Most websites go to great lengths to hide what they cost to run. These two put it front and centre and trust readers to find that interesting rather than off-putting.
Both are also small on purpose. A solar web server only works if the pages are light. Heavy scripts, autoplaying video and tracking code aren’t just bad manners on a solar site; they’re physically impossible to serve on a few watts.
What I’m taking from them
- Pages should be small enough to serve on very little power. That’s already a rule on this site: no third-party scripts, self-hosted fonts, a home page of about 55 KB.
- Showing the battery level is honest. Visitors can see what keeping the site up costs.
- A solar mirror, with an always-on copy elsewhere, gets the lesson without losing the library in a cloudy week. The main site stays where it is, and a second copy runs from panels on the bench, showing its own battery and going dark when the weather says so.
The power budget for that mirror is worked out, and a recent Hackaday write-up of a Raspberry Pi Zero W serving websites from RAM on a small solar panel shows how little hardware it really takes.
Further reading
- Low-tech Magazine, solar edition. The site itself, battery gauge and all.
- How to build a low-tech website, Low-tech Magazine, 2018. Hardware, power and design decisions in detail.
- Solar Protocol. The follow-the-sun server network.
- Solar powered Pi hosts websites in RAM, Hackaday, April 2026. A Pi Zero W running Alpine Linux and lighttpd from memory, on solar.
- How this site is built.