Ecohost, possibly the ultimate web host?

Apr 20, ’08 9:35 PM
Author Christiaan Categories Culture, Technology Tags ,

Logo of Ecobee, an ethical web host and web design companyThis weekend I finally moved my website to a new web host: Ecohost, possibly the ultimate web host.

It’s been a long time coming because my criteria for a new host included that it be low carbon, not store any data in the U.S. and do business in English. That’s a surprisingly difficult combination being that most English-speaking low carbon web hosts are in the U.S., using Californian solar energy to power their data centres.

I would have liked bragging rights that my web host produced its own energy but these guys do the next best thing, according to their website, and offer webspace in a data centre called Smartbunker, powered by 100% renewable energy sourced from Ecotricity.

Furthermore this data centre is apparently located in a high-security former nuclear bunker, offering a money back guarantee of 100% uptime. Not that my web host offers this but I’ll be curious to see how reliable it is compared to my last host.

And to top it all off, not only is Ecobee low carbon but it’s also a not-for-profit co-operative. Being a pareconist it really doesn’t get much better than this!

So it’s all roses—and fast to boot—but I’ll be sure to keep you posted.

Update 16-05-2008: Name changed from Ecobee to Ecohost

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Comments

One Comment so far. Leave a comment below.
  1. David MacClement,
    21 April, 2008 at 7:50 am

    I agree, Christiaan, and I’m envious; I’ve switched my main archive to a free site in Germany, for those sorts of reasons.

    I like what you said: “my criteria for a new host included that it be low carbon, not store any data in the U.S., and do business in English. That’s a surprisingly difficult combination being that most English-speaking low carbon web hosts are in the U.S., using Californian solar energy to power their data centres.”

    Ecotricity’s http://www.ecotricity.co.uk/about/our-progress/ has: “Ecotricity Progress Report 2007″ http://www.ecotricity.co.uk/about/our-progress/report-2007.pdf which has on page 12 of 16:

    The chart shows that from April 05 to April 06 20% of our total energy supply was from New Energy and that it increased to just over 24% the next year (year ending April 07). Based on our current schedule we’re on course to make further big strides this year – we expect to hit 30% by April 2008.

    It’s worth mentioning that this increase in our % of new green energy is against a background of customer numbers (and therefore amount of electricity supplied) growing strongly year on year. We’d have our work cut out just keeping our % of green steady with customer numbers growing like that. In fact we achieved an increase of 50% in green supply while our customer numbers quadrupled over the last four years – We’re pretty pleased with that.

    Ecotricity chart

    Reply

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