Dries Buytaert Explores Solar-Powered Web Hosting with Raspberry Pi

Staff Reporter

Solar panel on roofdeck — "Solar panel and Raspberry Pi Zero 2 are set up on our rooftop deck for testing. Once it works, it will be mounted properly and permanently," says Dries Buytaert.

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Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal, has shared a blog post documenting his experiment with a solar-powered, self-hosted website. Using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, a 50-watt solar panel, and an 18 amp-hour battery, Dries set up the site on his roof deck in Boston to explore sustainable and local-first web hosting. He acknowledges the limitations of this energy-efficient setup, noting that the site may go offline during cloudy days or the colder months, but views the occasional downtime as part of the experiment's value.

In his post, Dries discusses key technical challenges, such as managing power conversion between the solar panel and the Raspberry Pi, setting up networking with dynamic DNS, and real-time monitoring of his solar setup. He also touches on broader themes of sustainability in web hosting, questioning the need for constant uptime for non-essential websites. This project, he explains, is more about learning and encouraging greener, more localized approaches to hosting, hoping to inspire others in the web community.

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Source Reference

Title

My solar-powered and self-hosted website

Byline

Dries Buytaert

Date of Publication

18 October 2024

URL

https://dri.es/my-solar-powered-and-self-hosted-website

Disclosure: This content is produced with the assistance of AI.

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Dries Buytaert