Data centers and green don’t usually go together. Servers are known for being power-hungry and when you consider the amount of power that a data center uses, it’s almost impossible to get to 100% green. While we don’t dispute this claim, we think it’s more marketing than you’re lead to believe. Many “green” data centers just buy energy credits. Others might be powered by renewable energy, but we doubt it’s 100% renewable. So we don’t make these claims. While it’s true that we do consume a lot of green energy (North Carolina is second in the nation for solar production, according to Duke Energy), we can be certain that all of our energy is green due to the way the electric grid works.

How we keep it green

Back on Earth Day on Instagram, we shared how we do our part to reduce energy usage. We thought we’d reshare what we shared there for you.

We keep unused servers powered off.

While it’s true that our servers do consume what is known as “phantom power”, it’s very minimal compared to what a server always powered on consumes – even when idle. The phantom power we consume is for the BMC controller so when you do order a server, we can provision it without a DCO tech having to physically power on the server. And most of the time, we don’t even keep our servers in the rack. We keep them in storage so they really don’t use any power. It allows our techs to perform quality hardware checks. If we kept servers powered on, we could deploy them nearly instantly, but the kWh add up if we don’t. Plus, by taking our time, we are able to ensure quality checks that our competitors lack. In fact, it’s how we catch hardware before it fails.

We are a 100% remote company.

Instead of having an office and forcing everyone to commute, we’re keeping cars off the road. Not many cars, but still any number helps. Offices consume a large amount of power and resources – a lot more than our employees staying home. By being remote, we offset a lot of energy.

We encourage our team to plant trees & gardens.

We actively promote gardening and planting trees or other plants. Either in their yards or homes. Plants help filter out carbon dioxide in the air and release fresh oxygen. By adding more plants, we can make our communities greener and healthier.

You can keep it green, too!

If you don’t require a ton of energy consumption on your server, ask us to turn down your power settings or put your server into “green” mode. This will keep your server from using additional energy under load. While we don’t recommend it in all scenarios, but if you can live with it, we’ll be happy to apply a 10% green discount to each month’s bill.  Also, consider shared hosting or a VPS over a dedicated. If you’re hosting just a small handful of websites, shared hosting plans mean we don’t have to add more servers and it keeps our power usage lower.

Thanks for helping us keep it green!