Fubra is committed to reducing its impact on the environment, and we've found a way to slash our carbon footprint which makes good business sense too.
Computers produce 2% of the world's carbon emmissions - that might not sound a lot, but according to Gartner, this is the same as the amount of pollution produced by the aviation industry. We often don't realise that computers are contributing towards global warming because they don't emit big clouds of smoke or clog up the roads and air.
The energy used to power computers across the world is a silent polluter, and as a technology based business with over 100 servers and 30 computers, we were concerned that we were contributing to the problem. As with other issues we have encountered, we thought long and hard about an effective solution.
We realised that by intelligently configuring our resources we could half our power usage. Here is what we did...
We get visitors to our websites 24 hours a day, all year round, and to enable our visitors to view the pages our servers have to be switched on permanantly, which users a lot of power. However, the majority of the traffic is between 6am and 10pm, so there is no need to keep all our servers on overnight. This lead us to three solutions:
Electricity companies need to have the capacity to supply the demand at its highest point. During the day the demand for power surges, but overnight the demand drops. If this capacity could be spread evenly between day and night, power companies wouldn't need to generate so much electricity. We have servers all over the world, so we decided to re-route our traffic to servers in places where electricity demand is at its lowest. We make sure we use our servers at night, which helps to balance power surges. If other businesses followed our lead it would allow electricity companies to reduce their production capacity resources. It also makes good business sense, since power is cheaper at night.
We turn the majority of our servers off when there is less traffic. Our system is set up to leave a few key servers on, and to tell the rest of the servers to power on when the volume of traffic increases.
We locate our servers close to the energy production source, because power is wasted when electricity is transported around the country.
By hosting your site with us you too can help to cut carbon emmission produced by computers, and by doing business with us you are reinforcing ethical and environmental business practices.