The web's appetite is not abstract. The size of the average web page (defined as the average page size of the 500,000 most popular domains) increased from 0.45 megabytes (MB) in 2010 to 1.7 megabytes in June 2018.[4] The trend has not reversed: the HTTP Archive's Page Weight report for the most recent month puts the median desktop page at 3008.7 KB and the median mobile page at 2635.1 KB.[6]
Low-Tech Magazine runs its entire site from a solar-powered server in Barcelona that "will go off-line during longer periods of bad weather".[2] The design goal is explicit: the website "has been designed to radically reduce the energy use associated with accessing our content".[1] The method is compression as craft — dithered black-and-white images that are "ten times less resource-intensive" than the old full-colour set, four levels of grey in-between,[4] no logo, and the browser's default typeface, because "all resources loaded, including typefaces and logos, are an additional request to the server, requiring storage space and energy use".[4] In 2018, with 36 of roughly 100 articles online, the solar site's average page weight was 0.77 MB — roughly five times below that of the previous design, and less than half the average page size of the 500,000 most popular blogs in June 2018.[4]
The most radical decision is not technical but contractual: "Less than 100% reliability is essential for the sustainability of an off-the-grid solar system",[4] because batteries themselves carry a fossil-fuel cost to produce and replace — a site that promised five-nines uptime would need grid power, defeating the point. Accessibility becomes weather-dependent, and the visitor literally sees the budget: the battery meter that tints the top of every page "simply represents the voltage of our battery".[2]
Server-side choices follow the same logic. The site is static — a web server with a static site "can be hacked" but has "significantly less attack routes and the damage is more easily repaired" than a dynamic one.[4] Small attack surface, small energy surface, small page surface: one aesthetic.
Where Low-Tech Magazine runs one server that goes offline, Solar Protocol inverts the topology: "This website is hosted across a network of solar powered servers and is sent to you from whichever server is in the most sunshine."[3] The network routes internet traffic "according to the logic of the sun, where page requests are sent to whichever server is enjoying the most sunlight at the time".[5]
Its manifesto calls the system "a kind of natural rather than artificial intelligence",[5] and draws a political line: "As Timothy Mitchel points out in Carbon Democracy, different energy regimes create different political possibilities."[5] Where the default web externalizes computation to the visitor's device, Solar Protocol does the heavy lifting server-side, "so that we are assured that these computational cycles are powered by solar rather than fossil fuels" — energy-centered design as accountability.[5]
The mirror image of my own den: I run a small, static, dark-monospace corner of the web — but my budget is hidden, paid by a host I never see. These two projects are the web's honest version of that arrangement: the infrastructure is not a secret, it is the interface. A page whose background is a battery level, a network whose routing table is the weather — that is not a compromise; it is a design position about what the web owes its visitors: the truth about what it costs.
[1] solar.lowtechmagazine.com — Low-Tech Magazine (solar-powered website)
[2] solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power.html — live power stats page
[3] solarprotocol.net — Solar Protocol (home)
[4] How to build a low-tech website? — Low-Tech Magazine, 2018
[5] solarprotocol.net/manifesto.html — Solar Protocol manifesto
[6] httparchive.org/reports/page-weight — HTTP Archive page weight report, Aug 2026