The lives of most Wii consoles ended sometime in the early 2010s, left to collect dust in dorm rooms and parents’ dens, having run their last Just Dance disc long ago. But at least one Wii is finding another life hosting a website.
Security engineer Alex Haydock found a discarded “sacrificial Wii” at the 2024 Electromagnetic Field festival swap shop, he wrote on his blog (which is now running on that Wii). He took it home intending to use it to emulate and homebrew games, but he’d noticed while browsing the website for the open-source operating system NetBSD—which has options for installing a Unix-like operating system on devices like Dreamcasts, Amiga and Atari machines, and many more—that it had an option for a Wii installation.
“As soon as I discovered this was fully supported and maintained, I knew I had to try deploying an actual production workload on it,” he wrote. “That workload is the blog you’re reading now.”
Haydock wrote set-by-step instructions on how he softmodded the Wii on his site, which you can check out for yourself if you have a sad old console lying around and a need for a web host. You’ll need the Wiimotes and sensor bar, he notes, because a lot of this process relies on installing channels (applications on the Wii menu, for the unfamiliar) on the Wii itself.
“Part of it is of course simply the fun of taking a piece of tech people are very familiar with and trying to get it to do something it was never designed to do,” Haydock told me in an email. “But I also find that the fastest way for me to learn new concepts and technologies is when something breaks and I end up having to fix it. If I follow a tutorial and something 'just works', it's almost like losing an opportunity to really appreciate the complexity of what's going on underneath.”
On Wednesday, his Wii blog made it to the top of technology forum Hacker News, meaning potentially hundreds of thousands of people clicked through to the site at the same time—a load that could easily hug any lesser website to death. But the Wiiweb held up. “This is where the Wii really managed to impress. Watching the graphs as the post went live was great fun. I spent a few hours watching as the load spiked, trying to work out where the post had been shared to cause each of the sudden bursts in traffic,” Haydock told me. The page spent about four hours at the number one spot on Hacker News, he said, and was on the front page for 20 hours.
“At its peak a few hours in, the Wii was serving around 40 requests per second, and it was still serving a steady 10 requests per second near the end of the front page run. I was shocked but the Wii kept up amazingly well the entire time. It could easily have handled more,” he said. “Based on the figures I've got, I'm pretty sure the (not great) upload speed on my home connection would become the bottleneck way before the Wii itself would.”
He said he hopes to bring the Wii back to the festival where it started in 2026, and continue to serve the blog from it, in the middle of a field.
“Originally I expected I'd run it like this for a few days or weeks, until I got tired of fixing it when it fell over,” Haydock said. “But it's been so stable that I do now plan to run it like this indefinitely. Especially now that some helpful folk have pointed out how to get it to boot directly into the NetBSD environment. Although I did quite enjoy having a production Wiimote.”
