Sheet 04 · The meter reading
Thirty-five watts. That’s the whole story.
This is the entire power budget of a node serving Hostfluency sites — ceiling, not average. Watch the needle find it.
0W
Continuous ceiling · TDP
0.0kWh
Energy / month, worst case
$0.00
Power cost / month @ $0.15/kWh
≈2W
Per hosted site, at capacity
35W is a node’s ceiling under full load — it idles at a fraction of that.
The datacenter habit, measured.
Serving a small website from a conventional datacenter means paying for a big machine and then paying again to cool it. The overhead isn’t malicious — it’s just oversized.
A beacon node, at full tilt
35Wthe whole node, every site on it
Typical rack server
~350Wbefore anything cools it
Same server + datacenter cooling (PUE ~1.5)
~525Wwhat the grid actually pays
FIG. 07a — Indicative figures; rack draw and PUE vary by facility. Ours doesn’t.
The honest part: what happens when the power blips.
TODAY
Ordinary power, monitored
Beacon nodes run on ordinary power feeds, not a datacenter's redundant supply. We won't dress that up: a brief power blip can mean a brief outage. Monitoring alerts us the moment it happens.
PLANNED
UPS ride-through
A battery backup is on the roadmap so short blips never reach the nodes at all, and longer cuts end with a clean, automatic recovery instead of a hard stop.
ALWAYS
A status page with no weasel words
If we're down, the status page says down — with a timestamp and a reason. Infrastructure earns trust by telling the truth about itself, especially the unflattering parts.
Efficiency isn’t a feature here. It’s the architecture.
Less than your refrigerator
At roughly 25 kWh a month, worst case, a beacon node uses less electricity than a kitchen fridge. Most of the web's small sites could run this way — they just don't.
Long-lived hardware is green hardware
The most sustainable computer is the one that stays in service. Beacon nodes are business-class hardware doing useful work for another decade instead of becoming e-waste.
Right-sized, not super-sized
A brochure site on an idle rack server is a heater with a hobby. Matching workloads to right-sized machines is the quietest climate decision in hosting.
Revision A — Open for clients
Hosting that sips, not gulps.
Thirty-five watts, engineered headroom, and the drawings to prove it. If that's the kind of infrastructure you want under your site, come aboard.
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