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The power efficiency is fascinating - modern phones are basically ARM servers optimized for battery life. Pixel 5 probably draws <5W under load vs 50-100W for a
by pbd 1y ago
The power efficiency is fascinating - modern phones are basically ARM servers optimized for battery life. Pixel 5 probably draws <5W under load vs 50-100W for a typical x86 server. For a personal blog, that's 400-800 kWh/year savings. The environmental impact of reusing vs recycling electronics is under appreciated.
- SchemaLoad 1y agoFor a static site you can get a lot better by dumping it on S3 or Github Pages. Your site uses 0W while not being used since the server was already running, and it consumes no resource usage while not being requested. But yeah an x86 server at home for a static site is awfully inefficient.
- tonyedgecombe 1y ago>Your site uses 0W while not being used since the server was already running You are paying for it to be available (or in the case of GitHub Microsoft is as an incentive).
- SchemaLoad 1y agoIf you put it on AWS S3 (not subsidised), and your website is 1GB, which would be huge for a static blog, it'll cost you $0.27 per year to store / have available. The price is so incredibly small that numerous companies offer it as a completely free service.
- ljsprague 1y agoI use Nearly Free Speech to host and pay $20 every few years. Is there a freer host?
- selcuka 1y agohttps://pages.cloudflare.com/ https://pages.cloudflare.com/
- xeonmc 1y agoAren’t CF sunsetting Pages in favour of Workers? I would be hesitant relying on something that may be shut down anytime.
- wltr 1y agoDo you have some link at hand?
- wltr 1y agoSelf-commenting. Aha, I entirely missed this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44853934 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44853934
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoI mean, they are sunsetting pages in favour of workers but it seems that static pages even in workers would have unlimited bandwidth and unlimited pages so there seems to have to be no difference and I trust cloudflare enough that they won't really remove these cf pages.
- yoavm 1y agoI've just asked the Workers & Pages team (I work at Cloudflare), and that's not true. "If you’re wondering “What about Pages?” — rest assured, Pages will remain fully supported" https://blog.cloudflare.com/sv-se/builder-day-2024-announcements/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/sv-se/builder-day-2024-announcem...
- xeonmc 1y agoThat’s the corporate promise for now, but there is no Ulysses pact guaranteeing they’d support it forever if the financials don’t line up any more, so the second-best guarantee is if there is a strong self-interest incentive that would remain to be the case even in 20, 30 years? They mentioned that they need scale and so offers generous free tiers as proving ground, but would that incentive stay the same after a few decades?
- SchemaLoad 1y agoGithub and Gitlab offer free static site hosting.
- mPReDiToR 1y agoI've had a NextCloud server and an IRC bouncer running on Oracle Cloud with static IP for two years now, free of charge. More than sufficient to host a site, even dynamic.
- sieabahlpark 1y ago[dead]
- john61 1y agoDepends. If you reuse otherwise wasted electronic it is efficient in avoiding extracting resources / energy building new hardware and avoids recycling energy or waste polluting earth. A big picture analysis of reusing old hardware would be very interesting.
- Aachen 1y ago50-100W for equivalent work as a phone from 2020 can do would have been the case with CPUs from at least a decade ago. I should hope that one doesn't burn ~75W to host a few static files if it can also run on a Pi or phone or laptop that draws <20W idle That's not to say it's not a good idea to make use of the super efficient "Pi" you already have at home in the form of (several, probably) old smartphones! Just that you'd not use it for the same purpose as a gaming desktop that can't idle below 50W
- fuckaj 1y ago[dead]
- eadmund 1y ago> 400-800 kWh/year savings The average all-sector U.S. price per kWh is 13.20 cents (source: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_5_6_a https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...). Even at the high end that’s a savings of $105.60/year, or $8.80/month. The U.S. poverty line for 2025 is $15,650 for a single person (source: https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/dd73d4f00d8a819d10b2fdb70d254f7b/detailed-guidelines-2025.pdf https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/dd73d4f00...). $105.60 is less than one percent of that. Sure, energy efficiency is great and I would rather have $105.60 than not have it, but it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.
- fsflover 1y agoIt's not just the money but also the CO2 footprint, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45111385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45111385
- eadmund 1y agoGenerating a kWh emits 0.8 pounds of CO2 on average (source: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11); burning a gallon of gasoline in a car emits about 20 pounds of CO2. That means that 800 kWh (= 640 pounds of CO2 emitted) is as bad as using 32 gallons in a year. It just doesn’t matter much.
- fsflover 1y agoDid you account for the manufacturing of the server?
- pbd 1y agowell recycle is worth chasing as well in this scheme of things.
- zokier 1y agoOf course it depends on what you consider typical, but x86 can do pretty low power stuff too; n100 systems can idle <10w and 20-30w at full load.