Summary
- A person turned an old Nintendo Wii into a web server, hosting a website you can actually visit.
- The process involved installing the Homebrew Channel, NetBSD on an SD card, and running a blog off the Wii.
- Running the Wii as a web server costs around £3.47 a month, making it cheaper than many VPS options.
Some of the most interesting projects stem from giving old hardware a new lease of life. If you came across an unloved Nintendo Wii at a swap shop, what would you do with it? While some might take it home and play some Wii Sports on it, one person decided that they’d turn it into a web server. Best of all, you can actually visit the website the Wii is hosting, so you can read all about how the process works on the Wii itself.
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You can now visit a website hosted on a Nintendo Wii
As spotted by Hackster.io, this cool idea came to be after one Alex Haydock came across a Nintendo Wii at the Electromagnetic Field Festival 2024 Swap Shop. Originally, they wanted to crack open its software and run homebrew games on it, but he ended up going a lot further than that.
To begin, Alex employed a well-known trick to circumvent the Wii’s security and install the Homebrew Channel. They then installed NetBSD onto an SD card using the Raspberry Pi Imager app. They then plugged it into their Wii, booted it up via the Homebrew Channel, and worked their magic to get their blog running off of the Wii. You can actually visit his blog to see how his Nintendo Wii is doing, and read more about this feature in a blog post suitably titled “This blog is hosted on a Nintendo Wii.”
So, a Wii can host a website just fine…but how much does it cost to run it? Well, not that much:
I was reasonably pleased with the power consumption too. Some testing based on stats from my UPS monitoring suggest that when idling, the Wii is adding a fairly consistent ~18 W to my overall homelab usage.
By my calculations, that means I can expect the Wii to use ~13.2 kWh/month, which on my fairly expensive UK power tariff comes out to around £3.47/month – which does actually make this cheaper than most of the VPSes I can find around the obvious cloud providers. So when you’re looking for your next VPS… you know what to consider.
If you want to read more about breaking into Nintendo’s console, check out how a pair of tweezers was used to defeat the Nintendo Wii’s security.
