After a thorough search, we are now working with a new web hosting provider for the websites that we manage. Web hosting is where a website lives on the Web. It needs to be fast, reliable and supported by a dedicated technical team. And… it needs to be powered by 100% renewable energy.

Web hosting computers are active 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Keeping the World Wide Web online takes a lot of energy, and we at Dharmafly want to be as responsible and ethical as possible with our piece of it.

100% Renewable Energy Web Hosting

Renewable energy web hosting is fairly common in the US, where companies such as AISO use solar energy for power. However, there are fewer options available for UK-based hosting. Many of the UK-based companies that offer renewable energy web hosting are actually re-selling US-based hosting. This can be a problem for UK-based businesses who want their websites to rank well in Google and other search engines.

Search Engine Optimisation for UK Websites

When people in the UK search Google, they receive a set of results that favours UK-based websites. Google determines whether a website is UK-based in two ways. It will first see if the web address ends with .co.uk, .org.uk or another UK-based name. If, however, the web address ends with .com, .org, .net or another non-UK name, then Google will work out the country where the website’s hosting is based. Clearly, it is important that we can offer our clients UK-based hosting.

In a Bunker

We found a solution. Housed in what used to be a NATO military bunker, Smartbunker is the UK’s first web hosting centre to use 100% renewable energy. It runs purely from wind power, supplied by a wind turbine from Ecotricity.

The energy is actually renewable, rather than it being a “carbon-offsetting” project, where trees are planted to offset the carbon burned by non-renewable energy, such as coal.

(Techie details: We use high-specification, low-energy IBM Blade servers, with Intel Dual-Core Xeon 5148 LV 2.33 Ghz, 2GB Server Memory, 2 x IBM 73GB 10k SAS Hard Drive RAID 1250.00 43.75 and a Plesk control panel for domain management).

Co-operative

We work with Ecohost to manage our web hosting computers at Smartbunker. They are a worker’s co-operative, based at Manchester’s new co-operative offices, OpenSpace. They’re friendly, über-ethical and they really know their stuff.

Together, we’re happy to offer ethically hosted websites for the UK and beyond. If you’d like to get your website hosted with us, please get in touch.

I’ve submitted “Social Compost” as a project proposal to Social Innovation Camp.

SI Camp is a grassroots conference, where social entrepreneurs and web developers get together to help each other out. A number of great ideas have been submitted, a few of which will be selected for the event. My idea is to connect local people who produce kitchen scraps with those who produce compost.

I’ve moved home twice in the last 6 months, and both times to a top floor flat with no garden. We get a weekly delivery of fruit and veg (from Pulse) and quickly turn it into a whole heap of peelings. How could we just throw that juicy waste away… to slowly fester in a plastic bag on some landfill site?

And so, we have scoured both of these new neighbourhoods, looking for someone with a compost bin to take our scraps (thank you Toni, Jon and Anna). There must be a better way….

From the Social Compost proposal:

‘Social Compost’ would be a drop-dead simple website, based around an interactive map. There would be an option to add yourself to the map and to offer either kitchen peelings or mature compost. You could use the map to find others who are offering either peelings or compost.

Have you ever been in a situation like mine? What did you do? And how might such a website help you?