SiteBlox Eco Statement
SiteBlox is committed to doing everything possible to reduce the environmental impact of its service offerings. A few specifics of how we do this:
Development
Our primary development center is powered by a combination of Wind and Solar Power. There is a grid-connected 6KW solar array on the roof coupled with Austin Energy's GreenChoice Wind program. As such, the development center is 100% renewable energy powered. Additionally, there are other energy savings features such as a reflective metal roof and spray-foam insulation on the interior attic spaces to reduce the heating and cooling loss, use of natural light wherever possible, and on-demand hot water heating.
Our development servers consist of 65W dual and quad core servers with high-capacity, energy efficient hard-drives. All servers run DDR2 memory, have low-end graphics chipsets and run the server edition of Ubuntu with minimal components installed.
We host our source code control repositories at CVSDude, and donate to the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies as part of our monthly hosting fees.
Hosting
The SiteBlox solution is architected from the ground up to be as green as possible. Two main features enable this: 1) The solution is multi-tenant, and 2) The solution is designed for clustered computing. With these two features, the SiteBlox team can maximize the number of individual sites that are being hosted on a single set of servers. While many servers may run at 10 to 20% utilization, our servers run at 70 to 80%. In general, a server running at 20% consumes nearly the same amount of power as one running at 80%, so less power is wasted in our model.
The SiteBlox solution is also architected to run in a cloud model on a cluster of virtual machines. This allows us to scale the load handling capability as required. For instance, a given cluster may require 4 server virtual machines during peak daytime hours, but only 2 in the off peak hours.
With the cloud model, we can dynamically scale up and down the number of server instances required to run a given cluster with acceptable performance. Similarly, if you have key "spike" events, we can enable additional server instances in the cluster for those periods of time and then release them when they are no longer needed.
Because SiteBlox currently uses 3rd party hosting providers, it has fewer options and far less control over their energy consumption. As such, SiteBlox purchases annual carbon offsets through TerraPass on a server by server basis to counteract the effects of traditionally powered data centers. It is the near term goal of SiteBlox to move to an affordable, 100% renewable energy driven production solution.
