Some time ago, I wrote about switching our house over to wind power. This was a step in the right direction for all the electricity we use internally such as our lights, stereo, fans, and the computer that I type these entries and do my freelance graphic design on. But another question remained: what about the server that hosts the website, which is always on, 24/7 (along with all the other computers in the data center / server farm)? Well, earlier this year the host that we use announced they were going 100% carbon neutral, which was a pleasant surprise.
If you're looking for a web host and are interested in one that is concerned about the environment, consider using Dreamhost(and if you sign up using the links off this page or the promo code opensource, I'll get a bonus that I can use towards my hosting bill).
Here's some clips from the announcement:
Effective today, DreamHost is now a carbon-neutral company.
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To ensure we got [genuine, valid carbon offsets] we worked with The Green Office to obtain credits with true value that aren’t considered “trash tags”. We learned that our ecological footprint is 30,600 acres and we generate 2725 tons of CO2 per year. That’s about the same amount as 545 average homes!
We’ve offset that by doing a few things.
We’ve purchased Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) certified by Green-e. RECs don’t offset electricity-related emissions, but combined with the purchase of regular electricity they do help us to avoid them.
We’ve also purchased carbon credits certified by The Gold Standard. These credits come directly from reductions that meet standards established by the Kyoto Protocol and offset emissions from projects that would otherwise not exist.
We’re also looking for more ways to reduce our resource usage around the office and the data center. We’ve switched to using coffee cups made from fully renewable resources. In the last couple of years we’ve also been deploying many more servers with notoriously power-efficient AMD processors. As processor and server technology continues to evolve we’ll follow the path of power efficiency. It just makes sense!
And because Los Angeles is so large we’ve also got two offices on either side of the expanding megalopolis to ensure our employees spend less time sitting in traffic and more time not polluting.
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