I don't think it's necessarily a dumb question; yes SPARC machines were used all over the web in the 90's and 2000's, but the web has changed a lot in the last twenty years. If nothing else, I could see not being able to find a recent-enough TLS package being an issue.
I realize that reading through the article that they did get OpenBSD working on there and yeah if you can get a modern OS on there it will probably work fine, but I don't think the core question of "Can my SPARC server host a website?" is dumb.
Of course, and it works well too. When I moved houses from solar wind to solar + mains I switched my e450 off, this is only 4 years ago; it works fine. I love that machine ; it looks the part and it's indestructible. My company in the early 2000s was running on sparcstation 5s, a lot of them (they were giving them away by that time); I have them all in my garage and they all work still.
This is what websites ran on back in 2001! It doesn't seem like much of a stretch to host a website on one, especially one that resembles a 2001-era site.
27 years ago my job was hosting hundreds of websites (CBS News, among them) on Sun hardware just like that. It baffles me that anyone would consider this a question at all.
Same here, I was more of a big iron UNIX guy on those days, the Linux server we had at the office was for hosting MP3 files and as Quake server for the occasional LAN parties.
Aix, HP-UX and Solaris, alongside Windows NT/2000 were our production server operating systems.
> It baffles me that anyone would consider this a question at all.
Thank you for saying this. I read this article a few days ago and felt the same: it's a 64-bit gigahertz-class RISC purporse designed internet server with a gig of RAM, running a current OS released less than 4 months ago.
OF COURSE it can host a website. A hundred active ones at once, I should think.
The whole dot.com boom when every company on earth scrambled to host their website... pretty much all of them on Sun hardware. Thus the insane run up of SUNW share price prior to the bust.
Someone got a website to be served from some airbuds so a Sparc server, which is literally where we served websites from in the 90s, should be pretty easy
These old SPARCs are beloved by their developers for their ability to uncover obscure low-level bugs due to the platform's strictness.
Everyone else has adequately pointed out SPARC boxes basically ran the Internet back in the day. It wasn't uncommon to have a single box hosting an entire university department: email, web serving, application server, login shell, etc.
Slightly off topic, but: is it just me or does it become uninteresting to read things like this when the whole process is basically “so then I asked Claude this, and then I asked it this, and then this…”
I guess it takes away the intrigue of the project because anyone could do this (ask ai), and the only thing human left about it is the creativity of the idea itself. There’s not much merit to the effort.
Edit: nothing against the author or anything, it’s fun to do projects like this.
But I always kinda likened AI output to your kids’ artwork - to you it’s the best. To someone else, it doesn’t have as much impact.
Cloudflare Tunnels are awesome, dude. My blog is hosted on one and it's great how much you can configure on top of Cloudflare. I'm like the biggest enthusiast based on their feature set and how much they make free. Easy to convert me when I get to try even putting personal websites on their authentication flow.
> Network isolation: The Cloudflare tunnel creates an outbound-only connection, so no inbound ports are exposed on my home network
While inbound ports are not exposed you're still responding to incoming traffic so theoretically if someone can find a zero day in httpd nothing is anymore "network isolated" then if you had port 80 exposed to the world.
Author here: Thank you for posting this link! And I see the sentiment: "Of course it can, it was built for that"! And I fully agree! My clickbaity title was meant to be in the spirit of 2026. Exposing an older server (although not an old OS) to the internet and all it's nasties was not something I would lightly do. But this old Netra does a good job!
I guess the Cloudflare tunnel is a bit of cheating here, but I did not feel comfortable exposing something running at home. So CF came in clutch.
As for the hardware, yeah 1GB of RAM on a 2001 server, kits it out nicely! But even with that, I tried to limit what is running there so the server would actually work smoothly. (I even compiled a few Rust binaries, and yeah that took ages).
My old hardware collection has plenty of other candidates for hosting a website. So expect more!
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 80.5 ms ] thread(Source: guy who hosted websites on sparc's in 1995)
UltraSparc smoked Intel at web server response times because it could handle so many more threads for Apache.
I realize that reading through the article that they did get OpenBSD working on there and yeah if you can get a modern OS on there it will probably work fine, but I don't think the core question of "Can my SPARC server host a website?" is dumb.
Aix, HP-UX and Solaris, alongside Windows NT/2000 were our production server operating systems.
Thank you for saying this. I read this article a few days ago and felt the same: it's a 64-bit gigahertz-class RISC purporse designed internet server with a gig of RAM, running a current OS released less than 4 months ago.
OF COURSE it can host a website. A hundred active ones at once, I should think.
The whole dot.com boom when every company on earth scrambled to host their website... pretty much all of them on Sun hardware. Thus the insane run up of SUNW share price prior to the bust.
These old SPARCs are beloved by their developers for their ability to uncover obscure low-level bugs due to the platform's strictness.
Everyone else has adequately pointed out SPARC boxes basically ran the Internet back in the day. It wasn't uncommon to have a single box hosting an entire university department: email, web serving, application server, login shell, etc.
This is the beefiest SPARC I have ever seen. Very cool this is running. Getting this set up is no easy feat if you haven't tried before. Props to OP
I guess it takes away the intrigue of the project because anyone could do this (ask ai), and the only thing human left about it is the creativity of the idea itself. There’s not much merit to the effort.
Edit: nothing against the author or anything, it’s fun to do projects like this.
But I always kinda likened AI output to your kids’ artwork - to you it’s the best. To someone else, it doesn’t have as much impact.
Also, excellent use of the marquee tag.
While inbound ports are not exposed you're still responding to incoming traffic so theoretically if someone can find a zero day in httpd nothing is anymore "network isolated" then if you had port 80 exposed to the world.
As for the hardware, yeah 1GB of RAM on a 2001 server, kits it out nicely! But even with that, I tried to limit what is running there so the server would actually work smoothly. (I even compiled a few Rust binaries, and yeah that took ages).
My old hardware collection has plenty of other candidates for hosting a website. So expect more!