Raspberry Pi:
Energy Efficient, Low Cost, Web Server
UPDATE (06-04-2017): This website you're now viewing is hosted 100% from this Raspberry Pi!
World Energy Efficiency Day is approaching (05-March), perfectly timed with my project to reduce the energy consumed by my website.
To quote theenergyofchange.com: "the concept of energy efficiency refers to obtaining the same results using less resources". This project is exactly that...
My current DELL CS24-SC server churns out a fair bit of heat. The two powerful quad core processors get hot enough to boil water (literally, I've tried it), and require a lot of cooling - wasting energy.
The Raspberry Pi 1 has a rated load of just 3.5 Watts, compared to the hundreds of Watts of the big server, and as it's online 24-7 this will save a LOT of energy, if it works.
I calculate that annualy the Raspberry Pi 1 will consume up to 30kwh of electrical energy, costing around £3.70, that's roughly equivalent to cooking 4 or 5 roast dinners!
Setup
My site is hosted from home, via my domestic internet connection, so I have always written its code to be as lightweight as possible to speed up page loading via my limited bandwidth. As it's a lightweight site I thought there's a chance a simple Raspberry Pi may be able to handle it....
A friend recently gave me this unwanted Pi, so we are recycling here too. It's one of the first types released in 2012, a Raspberry Pi 1 Model B, it has 512mb of RAM and a 700MHz processor.
Using Raspbian Jessie Lite as the OS, I installed LAMP, copied the HTML, CSS and JS code files of my site onto the SD card in var/www/html, and we were good to go.
Raspberry Pi 1 Model B as Web Server with just power and Ethernet connected
The Proof Is In The (Raspberry Pi) Pudding
I gave it a whirl on my LAN, and to my utter amazement it worked perfectly! Pages loaded instantly!
I had expected some delay as it's such a simple device, but no, it was really quick!
Screenshot of my website hosted on a Raspberry Pi 1 Model B
I have a little more configuring to do before it goes live and I can remove the DELL server for good, but at least the concept is proven with better than expected results!