Servd is Going Green
Posted: 11th Jun 2020
Data centres consume a lot of energy.
Current estimates place the total at around 1% of all energy we produce, but that doesn't mean they also have to be large CO2 producers. Many data centres have taken this on board and now only source their electricity from 100% renewable sources.
Most internet services, Servd included, exist as an abstraction above the bare-metal servers which consume all this energy, so we aren't directly hands-on with the decisions that make this possible. We can however try to ensure that as far as feasibly possible, we're only making use of servers and services offered by companies that can and have made this choice. Influencing with our wallets and passing the CO2-free benefits on to our customers.
To this end, Servd is changing a few things in order to ensure that all of our underlying services are backed by 100% renewable energy data centres.
We are doing this because we believe it is the right thing to do.
We want to be the best choice for Craft hosting, not only technically, but also ethically.
Matt - Servd
Our primary compute clusters are already powered by renewables, so we're more than half-way to our goal from the outset.
The most significant change that we will need to make is moving several of our ancillary services (backups, temporary uploads, image processing etc) away from AWS, who have a particularly poor record for adopting and maintaining sustainable practices.
We've actually already started this process - any new database backups are currently being stored in a 100% renewable Interxion data centre instead of their old home, AWS S3.
So what should you expect? Nothing much will change for our end users. There won't be any service interruptions. Most things will move over to the new eco-friendly services without requiring any intervention at all. The only exception to this is the Servd Assets Platform which requires some manual actions to migrate over our old users, if they'd like to be. We'll be reaching out to those people individually.
Shortly, all new Servd projects will begin their lives with fully green credentials and we can continue building knowing that we're doing so sustainably.
