[dmd]

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.

[LeFantome]

Agreed. The Netscape IPO was over 30 years ago. What do people think the web was running on back then?

And why do you think that machine is called a Netra?

[tokyobreakfast]

> And why do you think that machine is called a Netra?

Netras were designed for telco use so not for any obvious reason as you suggest. It was available with -48V power supplies.

[Uvix]

Were those websites supporting SSL connections, much less TLS 1.2? That would be my question on hardware that old. (In this case, it looks like they offload TLS to Cloudflare, so the machine itself isn't doing any encryption/decryption.)

[charcircuit]

He offloads TLS to the Proxmox server within their home network. TLS is used between that server and Cloudflare to keep everything safe during transport.

[timthorn]

Typically, fun memory they'd move to a secure connection for credit card input, but most of the site would be open HTTP - why secure what isn't confidential? Concerns about 3rd parties eavesdropping on the sites you visited weren't a big thing at the turn of the century.

[pjmlp]

Yes, already back most people would not be putting their credit card details just like that.

[lproven]

> 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.

[pjmlp]

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.