I’m not going to get political (well not too much so) here. If you believe in global warming you’ll stop reading this post and turn off your browser. You are killing the planet 😉
According to some scientists, "20 milligrams of carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere for every second that an average web site is viewed". Don’t let your local green (I’m now thinking green means taxation and not environmentalism) party know about this or they’ll introduce web site taxes.
If you are concerned about carbon emissions or saving budget on power then there’s a few ways to reduce the impact:
- Get more from each web server: Use Windows 2008 X64 for more capacity. IIS7 is exponentially more efficient than IIS6.
- Reduce physical server numbers by adopting machine virtualisation, e.g. Hyper-V or VMware ESX. Note that VMware are working on a nice power saving feature (only supported in test now) and Windows 2008 R2 (Hyper-V V2) will include Core Parking to reduce power usage.
- Use hosted servers: Why build your own computer room/data centre when a shared services provider can give you one? This reduces your total costs (don’t just think of "how much is a server?"). Using a shared system can give you a smaller power bill and a reduced cost of ownership with higher up times – remember to check out hosting company claims and verify their SLA is worth more than the paper/web site it’s written on!
- Use virtualisation in a hosted environment: You can take advantage of both solutions to have a greater impact.
Whether you believe in global warming or not, there’s no doubting your belief in the bottom line, especially these days. Reducing your power bill by reducing your physical server numbers and using shared services will do that for you.
EDIT: Oh yeah, I don’t really believe surfing the net is killing the planet but I’m pretty sure the taxation party will look on it as an opportunity. Heck, they can’t make up their minds if we have too much water or not enough!