Hacker News Reader

Uhh, Yes? It is literally probably what this machine was doing in 2001.

(Source: guy who hosted websites on sparc's in 1995)

I remember SPARC being the mainstay of webhosting. It seems weird for this question to be posed.

UltraSparc smoked Intel at web server response times because it could handle so many more threads for Apache.

They even made CPU with a uarch specifically for webservers in the mid 2000s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T1 The VHDL was later published under the GPL.

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.

> I don't think it's necessarily a dumb question

It's not a dumb question, but OP didn't answer it. Cloudflare is fronting the website. So we don't know if the server is handling the entire traffic, nor if it's using TLS between it and Cloudflare.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com