Ecohost, possibly the ultimate web host?

Apr 20, ’08 9:35 PM
Author 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

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

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