Dreamhost goes carbon neutral
Posted by Peter Endisch on May 4th, 2007 at 08:36 PDT (Global Climate Change, News)
Who the heck is DreamHost, you say?
It is the company that provides me with hosting services, and that hosts this blog. It’s been a year and a half I am with them and I do love the freedom and goodies they give me. It also helps that all their software is open source, which aligns itself with my ideology as well. Their prices are dirt cheap, and they provide great service. I can also do pretty much anything I want, and install almost anything I want. I love this kind of freedom!
I am thus very happy to learn that they aligned themselves with yet another ideology of mine: to lower their ecological footprint! It can be hard, if you are in the technology sector, but they have done the right thing and offset all their carbon.
They have calculated the impact of everything that DreamHost uses and leaves behind in the course of their daily work. All of the resources that they use – paper in the office, electricity for their servers, even the gas in their cars that brings them to the office – leaves behind some kind of soul-sucking residue in the world.
When they learned that running DreamHost generated as much carbon dioxide as 545 average-size homes they realized they had to do something.
Although carbon offsetting should be the last resort, and not the crutch one relies on, for many businesses it is an important way to contribute towards solutions, till technology becomes more readily available to actually switch to renewable resources. In the case of DreamHost, they have switched to more efficient cpu processors (AMD) and they are on the lookout on how to reduce waste in their offices.
Congratulations DreamHost! I certainly hope you continue to push the envelope and hopefuly some other businesses can take a lesson from your endeavors!
ubuntui said,
May 13, 2007 at 23:15 PDT
Went to their site, they look good. Just finished signing up with them.
nikdo said,
May 14, 2007 at 09:37 PDT
Awesome.
Hey, judging by your nick, you’re using ubuntu? Rock on! So am I, for past six months now. Although I still have to use windows (trying to make it work via virtualization) for some graphics editing apps (Xara Extreme, till they completely port it to linux). However Ubuntu is real nice!
Welcome to Dreamhost, hope you have a positive experience like I do for the past almost 2 years.
Joe said,
May 31, 2007 at 10:15 PDT
What about having your web site powered by solar….AISO.Net (http://www.aiso.net) is 100% solar powered, both their servers and data center are powered by onsite solar panels. And they also have a partnership with Co-Op America, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Green Building Council. Plus, they are doing more then just making sure their electricity is green. Their data center and office is green too by using environmentally friendly air conditioners, solar tubes to bring in natural light, a propane powered generator instead of diesel, VMWare virtualization to reduce their server electricity usage, 6 watt energy saving desktop computers for their employees, and soon to be LEED certified as a green data center, the only public one in North America.