🥇Reflections on solar hosting for bees

It all started with a raffle... a hive raffle among beekeepers in exchange for a fun story — what they need it for.

Here, the cockroaches in my head took over and quickly typed a message that I need this hive not for bees, but to place a monitoring server there 😉.

Then my imagination drew Raspberry blades instead of frames with honeycombs, but it turned out that such a solution already exists (in the photo above).

In fact, I began to think about the necessity of a web server with an RRD database the moment of the first publication on monitoring bees four months ago.

Now, when there are already the first results, the need for such a server is becoming more and more urgent.

This is precisely what my 13th article on Habr talks about.

The cost breakdown for hosting in Ukraine is as follows — for $30 a year, one can get free domain name registration and a web server with a 4GB virtual disk.

To tie these figures to my task — even if I write the results of the Fourier transform four times an hour, it will come out to about a kilobyte.

In the end, a 4GB database will be able to hold information about 400 hives over a year.

For starters, this seems okay, but there is one BUT — not all space will be allocated for the database (usually only a quarter).

If you increase your appetites a bit, the price immediately exceeds the hundred-dollar mark — a bit much for a free project.

In short, here the frog has formed a coalition with the cockroaches and they are googling similar things.

Moreover, for a hundred bucks, you can actually buy four Raspberry Pis.

But good lord, what a hassle it is to tinker with them, to modify and come up with something!

The solution should be as simple as possible, easily portable to normal hosting and protected from power failures and internet glitches.

In fact, about 15 years ago, I already dealt with setting up a web server hosting at home, so I see no issues with domain and IP forwarding.

So here is my solution for choosing a platform — a motherboard based on a dual-core Celeron J1800 2.4GHz with a TDP of 10W, or something like that:

Packing this happiness into a nettop case will result in a quite compact system.

The server can run on an SSD disk, while backing up on a classic 2.5" HDD.

An additional plus is that many nettop systems use an original power scheme— a "laptop" power supply and converters inside the case.

And that brings us to the "solar" part of the narrative.

No, the issue isn't in installing a UPS; even the smallest one can power such a system for hours. Rather, it's the hidden desire to create a standalone server that isn't connected to any wires (yes, that hive in an open field 😉).

In general, a 100-110W solar panel should be quite sufficient. Paired with a battery from a "Tavria" and a charge controller, it will serve as a great alternative to a power outlet.

Internet issues? There’s home internet at 100 Mbps, and 4G in Kyiv is performing quite well (you didn't think that I would really set everything up in the field, did you? 😉)

I won't discuss software for two reasons:

That's a topic for a separate debate.
And I won't really have a choice— I'll just look at what the hoster I'm going to ultimately use employs and set up the same (from the Linux family).

In short, the server configuration is a Celeron J1800 2-core 2.4GHz, 4GB (2×2) DDR3 SO-DIMM, 32GB SSD-HD, 320GB HDD.

Do you know what’s the most enjoyable part of this story?

Free cheese! All components are already available, and their functionality/stability has been tested!