Companies claiming 99.9999 uptime is an absurd goal for a SLA, and wouldn’t even survive a small internet outage like a DDoS attack or Akamai outage. I remember in the 90s selling the idea of 5 9’s - 99.999% on my resume until some manager who Interviewed me asked me to state the expected downtime. I stopped claiming that number because it’s impossible without full active redundancy in different locations and not dependent on external providers like cloudflare ever going down.

And please don’t argue maintenance windows “cover it” because that’s not how they work in the real world today.

Downtime per year:

• 99% ~3.65 days (5,256 min)
• 99.9% ~8.77 hours (526 min)
• 99.99% ~52.6 min
• 99.999% ~5.26 min
• 99.9999% ~31.5 seconds

For my home lab I’m happy my stuff is online and content I hardly lose access when there’s a power outage thanks to my ups. But if I tracked I’d be closer to 95%. Good enough but I can’t wait till I just don’t care to run anything.

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.

100% uptime since the last time we turned it on!

doesn’t every website go down when there is no power? ;)

There's a nifty project on Mastodon where someone is running an instance entirely on solar (and I think a battery?). They've been tinkering with some of the code to do things like optimise images for reduced weight or CPU cost.

The project is called @solaradmin@solarcene.community and the account for the person running it is on a separate instance, presumably so people can message them about problems: @smallsolar@techhub.social.

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.

Uptime for home users is useless. More important is recovery, reboot and resume (the 3'Rs)

You server should reboot automatically, storage should restore itself from unsafe shutdown and your services should resume operations like nothing happened.

This means test your reboot, ensure stuff doesn't break, and so on.

Failing storage after an hard reboot is the hardest.

For network, i have two ISP connections and a an auto switch script Incase one goes down. But honestly it's overkill and not needed for 99% of home hosters.

Buying some kind of UPS like a battery powered power strip is also nice but keep in mind that require maintenance to replace batteries once every few years (long enough to forget) and so be useless. The ups shall only last enough to perform a controlled server shutdown using NUTS.

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.

garage is a software project made for communal home hosting. Tech literates will talk about its S3 API but that's the least interesting part: the most interesting is that it has been purposely built to be hosted on (actual) commodity hardware like second-hand nucs, running on flaky home power and internet and linked together through usual isps. Nodes may come up and down but the cluster withstands all of that.

Garage would be a pretty nice project to run a solar-powered mini-cluster. If sufficiently far from each other, you could even run without polluting batteries !

https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/

"Hey look everyone! We never heard of grid scale batteries!"

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.

It's honestly impressive what you can do with under 3W of power these days

Appreciate the website itself, with it's dithered low-colour PNG illustrations.

i love this website. The articles they wrote is always interesting

Use a gell cell lead acid battery (the kind that go in regular UPSs). No fire hazzard, ans bonus, they can survive freezing temperatures just fine if outdoors. Downside is replacing a cheap battery every 3 years.

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.

The 1% of the time it's down, there's always the Internet Archive or reading your own downloaded copy.

Current uptime of over 23 weeks, not bad

All websites go offline when there is no power ...

This actually cool.

Does anyone remember when businesses would operate their websites only during business hours and then take most of the functionality offline after hours?

I'm possibly also mis-remembering my early internet years and just talking shit.

I love Low Tech magazine! I have been reading them for years.

My brother in efficiency, let me introduce you to https://wiki.slrpnk.net/articles:start

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!

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.

Barcelona pff… now do it in Oslo! 🤣

There are solutions like IPFS for decentralized content hosting so downtime of a primary resource is less important.