Sustainable Hosting - Our Green Policy
Something you may not know is that the IT industy has a huge impact on the enviroment. At present, between 3 and 4 percent of all electricity (and the associated carbon emissions) used in the world goes to running data centers.
Climate change is happening now, and we as aan industry desperately need to curtail our IT carbon emissions.
Sustainable Hosting has gone green in a BIG way.
If you’re thinking about switching to green hosting, good for you! Green hosting is an important step in dealing with climate change. But be careful, you will soon realise that once you start asking questions you will discover that not all of the "green" hosting companies out there are nearly as green as they claim to be.
Sustainable Hosting is using renewable energy to both power and cool the servers, whereas some "green" hosts only count the electricity they use to power the servers.
Servers generate a lot of heat, so discounting the cost of cooling can make a huge difference in your carbon footprint! For every single unit of electricity that a server uses, one to two units of electricity are generally used for cooling.
What can you do to reduce your personal or companies impact on the environment? One simple thing is to switch your hosting over to Sustainable Hosting, if you have not done so already. We offer a range of services from Sustainable Web Hosting, Sustainable Reseller Hosting, and Sustainable Dedicated Servers.
There are also many ways to go green in your personal life. Most of them are totally painless, for example turning off your computer and other electrical equipment such as a Television at night, rather than leaving it in sleep or low power mode. Many of them will also have the added effect of saving you money - for example using fluorescent bulbs instead of waseful incandescents.
Steps being taken in our datacentre:
- We only use low-power (not low-spec) servers to reduce our energy usage.
- When servers are not in use by clients (ie spare capacity) they are powered down.
- Reduce or eliminate air con usage where possbile.
- Increase the temperature of the datacentre slightly reduces the load on the air-conditioning dramtically, but produces very little effect on hardware failure rates.
- All electricity used in our datacentre is from renewable sources, some of our servers are located in a Solar Only datacenter which is completely cardon-free! Others are in datacentres that purchase "green" energy from renewable sources to cover our usage.
Steps being taken in our offices:
- Set computers, printers, etc. to go to "sleep" after a few minutes.
- Don't print unless necessary (we are almost paperless)
- Print and copy double-sided to reduce paper use
- Use recycled paper products when printing is required
- Purchase furniture that is made of recycled products, and recycle or donate once it's no longer needed
- Replace incandescent bulbs with CFLs
- Turn off computers and lights at night - install power strips so it's easy to turn off all electronics at once
- Domain policies enforce power down of desktop computers when not in use/out of hours.
- Encourage recycling by having bins accessible around the office
- Have reuseable ceramic mugs for coffee or water, rather than disposable ones
- Encourage carpools
- Purchase carbon offsets
