Recently, I was chatting with a friend, and we were talking about ‘de-Googling’, federated networks and self-hosted services. As I was listing the benefits and my largely positive experience with them (the Fediverse for the most part), my friend pointed out that it isn’t an environmentally friendly solution, nor is it optimised for the long term. He told me that it requires more machines that consume more energy than a single large one, as these machines aren’t specialised for hosting services. What’s your view on the argument that ‘several small machines that consume more energy are less optimised and eco-friendly than a single large one built and designed for that purpose’? I realise that the large machine goes hand in hand with techno-fascists and that they are the real problem, but what if we were to look at this from a purely technical, forward-looking perspective on a clean future? How would you respond to this ?
Honestly, I think your friend is right, it’s a question of economy of scale. As you scale up there will be less and less wasted resources in overhead. Once you reach the scale where you need hundreds or thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of servers to operate your site you’d likely be able to fairly efficiently dimension the amount of servers you have so that each server is pretty efficiently utilized. Youd only need to keep enough spare capacity to handle traffic bursts, which would also become smaller compared to the baseline load the larger your site becomes.
Realistically most self-hosted setups will be mostly idle in terms of CPU capacity needed, with bursts as soon as the few users accesses the services.
As for datacenters using optimized machines there is probably some truth to it. Looking at server CPUs they usually constrain power to each core to add more cores to the CPU. Compared to consumer CPUs where at least high-end CPUs crank the power to get the most single-core performance. This depends heavily on what kind of hardware you are self-hosting on though. If you are using a raspberry-pi your of course going to be in favor, same is probably true for miniPCs. However if you’re using your old gaming computer with an older high-end CPU, your power efficiency is very likely sub-optimal.
As a “fun” fact/anecdote, I recently calculated that my home server which pulls ~160W comes out as 115kWh in a month. This is a bit closer than I would like to the 150-200 kWh I spend on charging my plug-in hybrid each month… To be fair though I had not invested much in power efficiency of this computer, running the old gaming computer approach and a lot of HDDs.
That said there is plenty of other advantages with self-hosting, but I’m not sure the environmental angle works out as better overall.