As mentioned before the primary thing that makes this webserver unique is that rather than running Linux, BSD, or Windows (god forbid!) I've instead opted to run Haiku OS, the open source continuation of BeOS. I could have easily ran it on Linux, but what fun is that? I've been interested in Haiku for a while now, and while I'm no expert on OS design, the thought of an OS designed from the ground up for what the computers of the future will look like has felt like a promising one. This could have easily gone very wrong, since after all there's no way to know what the future of PCs will be, but they got it mostly right, especially on the point of it being massively multi threaded. This means that with a well designed native program every button, every element, every little piece of the program is its own thread, and they are divided equally among all CPUs. Compare this to more standard operating systems which were designed for single CPU systems with multiple processor support added in later, in which as we all know cores 1 and 2 get the brunt of the load, while it seems as though the rest are on permanent lunch break.
There are still a few things that need working out of course. For example, it's a one user system. While most people only use one user account on their system, this has a few more ramifications than just not having a guest account for your friends to use. Most notably, you always have top level privileges. In terms of Linux, you are Sudo, you will always be Sudo, there are no other users than Sudo. You don't have to put in passwords for anything, the system will just automatically do it without question. Scary, huh? Along with this, there is an increasing amount of software available on Haiku is simply ported, rather than actually developed or significantly altered for it to run well on Haiku. All of those tiny threads that I mentioned earlier aren't present in these programs, which makes them run noticeably worse than programs written purposefully for Haiku.
Still, my experience with it has been great. Setting up this server was as easy as installing the OS, going to the package manager and installing the webserver application, and then dropping the HTML into the appropriate folder. My favorite anecdote about Haiku is that when I was installing it on this very server I assumed it would take a good couple of minuets like any other OS I've installed, so I went up to go grab some water. About a minuet later I come back and it's prompting me to restart. I look around a bit trying to figure out what went wrong, since surely it didn't completely install while I was gone, but lo and behold there's the text reading "Installation complete." Haiku installed from a CD onto an Intel Atom with 2GB of RAM in under a minuet. In the time I've used it it's managed to make even Linux start to feel like a dinosaur.
CPU: Intel Atom 330 hyperthreaded dual core @ 1.60 GHz RAM: Super Talent 2GB PC667 DDR2 MoBo: SuperMicro X7SLA-H with Intel 945GC chipset and Intel i945 graphics Storage: 128GB Transcend SSD320Low power servers have pretty uninteresting specification I guess.
You may be wondering why I've decided to make my website look like... this. Put simply, it's practical and I like it. Probably one of the main reasons I like it is because I have many fond memories where I had extremely poor connection to the net, but sites like this, just plain old HTML, would load fine. Even if there wasn't enough of a connection for all of the pictures to load in the text would still load easily and I'd still be able to read it. Not only that, but these sites were often some of the most interesting and information filled. There was no such thing as SEO to these sites; if someone wanted to read them they were more than welcome to find the site on their own. Once I began tinkering with older computers I soon found out that rarely do they support HTTPS, and once again these small and simple sites came in useful, as now I had something to actually do with these computers while hooked up to the internet.
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