It's no secret, the Earth is in trouble and the 'average modern lifestyle' hasn't helped things in the slightest. As part of our goal with URHOST we wanted to focus on trying to at least cover ourselves and our clients services, after looking into multiple options we decided on the following course of action to do so.
Our targets come down to the following three areas.
- Renewable energy in every data centre
- Track our contributions in real time
- Support long-term projects
So the first big question is this...
How do we do it?
Starting off was 'easy' during our planning stage we had some requirements - ensure we could power every data centre from renewables or ensure the provider would be moving to a renewable model as part of the 'Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact', an EU initiative signed off in 2020 to ensure data centres run on 100% renewable energy by 2030.
We first met this goal by deploying nodes to Hetzner GmbH who power their German data centres using 100% hydropower. While we had all of our nodes running on clean energy in Germany, we knew we could build out sustainable infrastructure without any concern. During our development of offsite S3 backups we wanted to keep them out of the country and hosted with a different data centre provider. This rules out Hetzner's HEL1 data centre. We wanted to also keep latency as low as possible to the rest of Europe so we decided on a more central location, AMS provided by Scaleway Cloud.
During our next expansion we wanted to cross the channel and come back home to London. Coming home also presented us with lots of great choice for DC vendors providing renewable solutions, we had the obvious choices of Equinix or Ark but we decided on Virtus who source energy from a solar, wind and hydro mix.
Now that our core infrastructure was running on renewable, we still had some vendors who don't and at this time have no public commitment to do so. Until either NIC.ST commits to renewables or Cloudflare brings on .ST domains to their registrar we have to offset these extra amounts of Carbon. In order to do this, we chose Klima because of their transparency and widespread target areas, providing 20 tonne offset agreements to cover any parts of our supply chain which are not powered by renewables.
Long Term Targets
We know offsets won't fix the future which is why we've always looked ahead, since Feb 2021 URHOST has been a Stripe Climate member and in being so every transaction will see 2% of the checkout value put towards funding long-term carbon capture and removal projects. We're able to track our progress via their dashboard and will periodically share the stats to both Stripe and Klima with our Discord members.
Future plans:
- Increase the current 2% Stripe transaction fee to 5%
- Increase offset agreements from 20 tonne to 60 tonne
- Vendor review and (potential) replacement for green vendors
