Green is for the family
I often point out that ServInt has more years actively providing service to the industry than many of our competitors do months. ServInt started in 1995, a lifetime ago in this industry. That’s one of the things that makes us better. We have experience that competitors only dream of. Hot ‘up and coming’ providers have come and gone, and we’ve been here to learn from their mistakes (as well as some of our own). We’re the steadfast and reliable alternative to the shiny new kid on the block – the host you can choose and know that they’ll take care of you for years to come, not just through this week’s special promotion.
It was a natural fit to adopt ‘green’ as part of our culture, because longevity and sustainability have always been what we’re about. It’s why we have grown organically without taking on debt to fuel growth. It’s how we survived and thrived through the ‘dot com’ boom and bust.
Above all else, it is our people that set ServInt apart. Because we are a place where you can build a career and a life, we attract the best and brightest. The same culture that embraces ‘green’ embraces the idea of ‘family’, because both look towards what’s right for tomorrow.
Each spring ServInt holds a company picnic. We enjoy the day together, play games and relax. Each year, a few employees pass their ’10 years of service’ mark and receive a company watch. Our dedication to our employees, and to longevity, is palpable. What strikes me more than anything else, though, is just how family-friendly ServInt is as a place to work. Every year I am amazed watching the ServInt family grow. Every year I meet new infants, congratulate newly expectant parents and marvel at how fast the kids I DO know are growing.
Whatever we are doing, we are doing for them.
We call our clients “The ServInt Family” as well, and we are absolutely motivated by what’s right for them. Whether we are making decisions that affect our children, our clients or our clients’ children, we do it knowing that we’re in it for the long-haul. ServInt is a place where people build careers. ‘Green’ is one aspect of that, mostly because it fits in to our long-term strategy – to be your host, and maybe one day your children’s host.
-Christian
Green is for the home
Happy Earth Day everybody! 
I was going to take the day off from work today, in order to complete one of my own personal Earth Day goals. But Earth Day around ServInt is particularly busy, so I’m postponing my goals for the moment. Instead I would like to share them with you here.
I am going to go meet my farmers.
“Green” means different things to different people, and each of us has our own goals and our own comfort levels with making changes that positively impact our environments. I am not trying to evangelize or to change any minds here. I just wanted to give a quick glimpse at some of my own current green goals, because they may be slightly different than some of the ones you’ll be hearing all Earth Day long.
Of course, those are important, so let’s get a few of them out of the way:
Buy and use compact fluorescent bulbs. Don’t drive when you can walk. Carpool or use public transportation when you can. Think about taking the stairs instead of the elevator. Look into hybrid vehicles. Get some reusable shopping bags. Recycle. Turn off stuff when you leave the room. Use low-flow showers and toilets. Give a hoot, don’t pollute.
To those helpful (and hopefully not condescending) suggestions I add one – consider going to meet the people who make the food you buy, and to see how it’s made.
“Organic” is a buzzword that has been overused almost as much as “green”. When my son was born in 2007 we thought we ought to try to eat organic, but needed to do a bit of research to figure out why, and what that meant to us. I was heavily influenced by two books written by Michael Pollan – In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. The ‘hero’ of the latter is a Virginia farmer named Joel Salatin, who talks about the benefits of small, sustainable farming. He makes a shockingly compelling case.
Most food (even the stuff sold at places like Whole Foods) comes from industrialized farms. I am not going to go into too many details about what that means, or whether that’s a good or bad thing. All I’ll say is that in America the small farmers struggle to survive. That’s a shame, because many of them are doing some wonderful things.
In 2007 my wife and I joined a CSA. That’s a Community Supported Agriculture group, which links consumers directly with a local farm at the beginning of a growing season. We pre-purchase produce for the season, and are shipped fresh vegetables and fruits every week. We never know what we’re going to get, but what we DO get tastes great.
An example:
Before we joined the CSA, I disliked tomatoes. They were a favorite when I was growing up, but by the time I hit adulthood they had fallen out of favor. When we started receiving our CSA tomatoes my opinion changed immediately. Fresh, locally grown heirloom tomatoes tasted like the tomatoes from my childhood – delicious.
We also started buying meat, eggs and dairy from a group that went out to Virginia-based small, sustainable farms and brings them up to Northern Virginia. The group is called The Local Flavor.
I’ve really enjoyed learning about my food, and really thinking about the way I eat. What I have yet to do is meet my farmers. So in the next 2 weeks I’ll be going to visit the place we get most of our fruits and vegetables and most of our meat, dairy and eggs. That’s my personal green goal at the moment.
Again, I’m not evangelizing here. I just wanted to share some of my own personal thoughts and green goals. I thought it would be a nice break from talking business, and a different way of celebrating Earth Day. Everybody has their own story to tell. This is a small piece of mine.
-Christian
Green is for the business
You already know the case for ‘going green’ in your daily life. You are being marketed-to every day about the benefits of environmental awareness. Some campaigns appeal to your emotions, asking you to “do it because it’s the right thing to do”, but the more effective ones couple that with the practical reasons to try and make a difference.
If you buy compact fluorescent bulbs, the packaging tells you in big letters and numbers what your power savings will be over time. Those bulbs are more expensive, but if you are willing to make a larger than normal investment up-front the benefits will pay off long-term. Not only do you get a bulb that costs less to run, you also get one that is longer-lasting than the filament-based alternative. If you are planning on staying in your house a long time, switching to compact fluorescents is a wise investment. At the end of the day, it’s just the smart thing to do.
The foundation of ServInt’s “Green Initiative” isn’t any different than that. It starts with smart business, pure and simple, and we build on it from there.
Let’s break it down as simple as possible. Hosting uses enormous amounts of power. We use it to run all our equipment, and to back up that equipment, and to cool that equipment, and so on. Power is expensive, and it’s costs continue to climb. The technology exists to lower the necessary power footprint used by the average hosting client. It requires a larger than normal up-front investment.
But just like the compact fluorescent bulb, it saves money on energy. It also generates less heat, so it costs less to cool. And since temperature (even in highly controlled environments) is a top cause of hardware failure, it breaks less often. That’s why ServInt decided to go exclusively Dell low-voltage on its entire server and VPS host-server line. It was just the smart thing to do.
Our overall power reduction became dramatic when we started developing ‘DSR’ VPS technology – VPS products designed specifically to replace traditional Dedicated Servers. We were able to combine high-end, low-voltage Dell hardware technology with our Parallels Virtuozzo Containers-based proprietary VPS solutions in a way that provided customers with more hosting resources and redundancy than they had when they were in their own servers. That lowered our overall per-user power footprint dramatically.
Now ServInt can do more in a smaller footprint. With our Dedicated Server Replacement (DSR) VPSs, we can give you significantly more hosting capabilities and redundancy on a VPS than you can get on comparably priced server. Our investments have paid off in tangible ways. By making the right investments, we’ve accomplished goals on a grand scale that are fundamentally no different than the investments you make in switching to compact fluorescents.
Reducing ServInt’s average per-user power footprint is only one component of our much larger Green Initiative, but it’s a vitally important one. Your business can surely take a look at your own operations, and can find ways to invest in ‘going green’, which is quite often synonymous with ‘increasing overall efficiency’. A lot of ‘going green’ can be accomplished by simply being practical and making smart, forward-looking decisions.
-Christian
Happy Earth Day Week from ServInt!
Let’s talk about green…
In celebration of Earth Day, I’ll be writing a few short notes each day talking about what we see as the many purposes of our Green Initiative. I’ll be taking a look at our goals and intentions from a number of different experiences. I want to start the week with a brief outline, and then each day we’ll focus on a different aspect of what ‘green’ means to us here at ServInt.
We all hope you have a great Earth Day Week, and that you think about what ‘green’ means to you in your life.
What follows is a quick preview of my upcoming posts.
Tuesday: Green is for the business
ServInt’s Green Initiative isn’t something we’ve built because we are all granola-fed tree-huggers. It’s something we’ve done because it makes sense – not only for our own business but for client businesses as well. I’ll talk about the business benefits of lowering our per capita power footprint, and about sustainability.
Wednesday: Green is for the home
Each of us approaches ‘green’ in our own way. On Wednesday (Earth Day itself) I’ll talk about some of the things I’ve tried to do in my own life to be more green. Personal experiences play a part in our Green Initiative, and I’ll share my own. My goal is not to evangelize, but just to provide a few more details on my personal perspective.
Thursday: Green is for the family
I’ll discuss what we think about when it comes to making decisions that will affect our families. ServInt has become known as a very family-friendly workplace. Many of us have kids and are building towards a future. We care about the long-term impact of what our company does. When customers sign up, we welcome them to “The ServInt Family”. I’ll talk a little bit about what that means to us too.
Friday: Green is for the future
This post will be a summation of the week’s thoughts. It’ll also discuss some next steps, and will even include a fun announcement. Stay tuned!
-Christian
Clean. Green. Responsible. Hosted by ServInt.
Lots of fun new ‘green’ themed banners available to ServInt affiliates today! Affiliates should check the customer portal.
Renaming our blog
We are working on some upcoming changes to the ServInt blog. One of the things we’re looking to do is to choose a new name for the blog – something a little catchier than “The ServInt Blog”.
We started a contest in our customer forums to choose the new name. If you are a ServInt client, go to , share your ideas and you can win free service.
-Christian
So What Is This ‘Green Audit’ Anyway?
I had a conversation with a customer today in our internal forums that I thought I’d share here. He said that tons of companies are claiming to be green and that usually it doesn’t mean anything.
He wanted to know what went into our internal ‘green audit’. Here are a few of my comments to him:
ServInt is doing what I think everybody should be doing, which is starting to find ways to operate more responsibly with more consideration for every aspect of how we operate. That means every aspect – from how our employees get to work in the morning to where the energy comes from to fuel our generators and everything in between. ServInt may use the word ‘green’ for lack of a better term, but it is an easy way to encapsulate what we are trying to accomplish.
Do we have a very, very long way to go? Absolutely. But I want to tell people we’re thinking about it and that we have tried to take some real action to attempt to do things right. We have built tools to analyze the environmental aspects of the way we do what we do.
We didn’t start green, so we have even further to go than somebody who built their datacenter in an area with more abundant renewable power sources like wind, solar, geothermal or hydroelectric. But we try.
What goes into the audit? It’s a lot – and it’s mostly long and dull. Covering meeting our ‘marketed’ green goals is the easy part. After that it’s an audit not only of power resource usage but of office utilization. For example we audit how paper is used – WHAT paper is used – whether our own internal ‘paperless’ goals have been met. It covers what monitors are in use and what their wattage is – what the lighting is in the offices and datacenters – what the maintenance schedule of the HVAC systems are and a ton of other stuff like that, which together in the end tell us that we are meeting today’s goals for energy conservation.
Tomorrow’s goals will be even higher, and we will meet those too.
2008 was a good year for green
I haven’t been writing about our green initiative lately, because I’ve spent all my time (well, not all my time but all my Green Initiative related time) finishing up our 2008 internal audit. We did a full review of all our goals to make sure we met them all. We just announced the completion of that task. You can read about that here:
We’ve finished our initial goalsetting for 2009 too, and in addition to doing everything we did in 2008 and trying to do it even better, we’ve got more cool stuff in the works as well. I can’t say yet – you’ll have to be patient. I’m very excited about a couple of these projects, though. This place is getting greener and greener. As it should be!
-Christian
Reducing waste
In my last couple of posts, I’ve been talking about ServInt’s green initiative, and have promised that we would start exploring ServInt’s green methodologies. Today I’d like to start that process, but first I wish to introduce a couple new concepts to the discussion that will help me show that ServInt’s green initiative isn’t just for the environment – it’s for the direct benefit of the client as well.
I’ve talked about the concept of kaizen previously, and described how green hosting is a continual improvement project. Kaizen is a business philosophy often used in manufacturing, and is cited as one of the major concepts of Lean Manufacturing – a production practice pioneered by Ford but perfected by Toyota, whose Toyota Production System (TPS) is the envy of most in the manufacturing world. The central goal of Lean Manufacturing is to “reduce waste” – (muda wo herasu in Japanese).
By focusing their efforts on thinking through all of their processes, utilizing the abilities of all of the employees and by focusing on machinery and tools that are efficient, Lean Manufacturing groups reduce waste and continuously move towards the goal of running the least wasteful organization possible. Kaizen groups focused on reducing waste end up creating greener organizations and lessening the overall environmental footprint of their products, while improving their businesses at the same time.
We have the same goal.
As I’ve mentioned before, it’s our goal to utilize the most efficient, low voltage servers available that serve our clients’ needs. It is our promise to recycle our server components in a way that is environmentally friendly. We also choose to invest in carbon offset projects that help take things a step further. These programs help, but are not enough. To go further, we are exploring new ways of decreasing waste and increasing efficiency. We are examining every aspect of what we do, not only exploring the hardware we use but the way that we think and the way that we act. We also carefully explore the way that we INTERact with our clients, which itself has the ability to reduce waste.
How?
Just as servers can get more efficient, clients can also conserve energy in managing their servers by using the most efficient means possible. We seek to optimize their server management and more importantly, their time management through getting them what they need when they need it. Whether that is by persistently and consistently updating our forums or through efficient, quality responses to support tickets. Our combined centuries of experience are poured liberally into our clients’ minds on a daily basis to help them improve their own efficiency. In this manner, our clients spend less time wondering what the answer is and more time on more important matters.
In other words, we help clients “reduce waste” by providing the most efficient means to accomplish their own web hosting management tasks, 24/7/365. The same business concepts that make us greener make us better at our jobs, and you better at yours.
ServInt’s dedication to reducing waste at every level is a quality that sets us apart and provide a superior level of service to all of our clients. New clients to ServInt should be prepared to reduce waste by decreasing not just your carbon footprint but your time commitment as well.
-Christian
Green hosting is a Kaizen (改善) project.
Kaizen
We’ll never be done, because there will always be another aspect of ‘green’ to tackle. There will also be new ideas to explore – some worthwhile and some that prove to be very bad. Just for fun, let’s take a look at a quote that my friend Doug shared with me a while back:
A single human produces 480 kg of CO2 per year on average.
A single active human produces 520 kg of CO2 per year on average.
His moral? The less you do, the better off we all are. By that logic, Doug says that if we all automate our daily operations, we can save the environment!
That’s a pretty funny thought, but obviously untrue. The ‘automated human’ uses tools that generate their own CO2 footprint. Those tools are bound to cause more environmental damage than could possibly be saved by sitting around doing as little as possible. So… sorry… sitting on the couch just isn’t going to save the world.
Doug’s tongue-in-cheek idea of the ‘automated human’ being more green does make you think about the actual challenges of going green. If you really want to be ‘green’ you need to look at the environmental impact of EVERYTHING you do, and everything you use to do it with. Take a moment to try to imagine how you would quantify and analyze the impact of everything you do, and everything you use to do it with. It’s pretty daunting, isn’t it?
ServInt faces those challenges as we continue to explore ways to provide ‘green’ hosting to our customers. We try to analyze every aspect of how we do what we do, in an attempt to make wise and environmentally conscious business decisions. We start with decisions that are good for the environment and good for business too. Those are the easy ones. Many of the other choices we make are tough, complicated decisions. We want to make a tangible difference, and seek to provide a truly ‘green’ service to our customers, but not everything is cut-and-dry.
A Kaizen project looks at the achievement of business goals as an ongoing journey that never ends. A Kaizen project constantly strives for the next level. One of MY goals with this blog will be to highlight and describe ServInt’s journey for you. I’ll talk a bit about some of our initiatives – some of the things we’ve done, and some of the things we still need to do.
We’re proud of our accomplishments but we know we have tough decisions up ahead as well. A Kaizen project never reaches a final form, but constantly evolves. ServInt’s green initiatives aspires to do just that. We’ll continue to do our best to find ways to offer you the best hosting service out there. We’ll also take on the challenge to do it in a responsible way, focused on continuous improvement.
