Whammo!

April 29, 2007 on 8:25 am | In Funnyish, Insider View by Josh Jones | 44 Comments

Somebody outside our office window was waving at fellow co-workers, showing off his new ride… and BAM!!! BING!!! BANG!!! POW!!!

We’re green.

April 20, 2007 on 3:26 pm | In Insider View, New Features, Promotions, Tech News, Updates by Brett | 162 Comments

Effective today, DreamHost is now a carbon-neutral company.

That’s awesome!

But what does it mean?… It means a few things, actually!

It means we’ve calculated our carbon footprint. Our footprint represents the impact of everything that DreamHost uses and leaves behind in the course of our daily work. All of the resources that we use - paper in the office, electricity for our 1300+ servers, even the gas in our cars that bring us to the office - leaves behind some kind of soul-sucking residue in the world.

Electrical power plant emissions clog up our atmosphere. Cars idling in LA’s renowned freeway traffic turn the skyline a muddy brown. Angry profanity-laced faxes are printed on laser printers which generate headache-inducing ozone. (Thanks for those, by the way.)

Putting a price on carbon output is just one way to help make the world a better place. It’s a first step towards true energy sustainability. Organizations large and small are constantly working on reducing their environmental emissions to meet government-imposed (and self-imposed) emissions caps. When they do so a neutral third party then steps in to verify the reduction and issues what are known as “emission reduction credits”.

Companies like DreamHost can purchase these credits which are then immediately retired on their behalf. This effectively takes them off the market and the money goes toward funding further emission reduction projects. We are not currently able to actually power our servers with the wind or the sun, and this is the next best thing!

The market for purchasing voluntary offsets is blowing up right now, and as such it’s a bit of a wild west.

You can find “offsets” for as little as ~$5 at ton all the way up to $30. At the low end you risk purchasing an offset that is not actually doing what it says.

To ensure we got the good stuff we worked with The Green Office to obtain credits with true value that aren’t considered “trash tags”. We learned that our ecological footprint is 30,600 acres and we generate 2725 tons of CO₂ per year. That’s about the same amount as 545 average homes!

We’ve offset that by doing a few things.

We’ve purchased Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) certified by Green-e. RECs don’t offset electricity-related emissions, but combined with the purchase of regular electricity they do help us to avoid them.

We’ve also purchased carbon credits certified by The Gold Standard. These credits come directly from reductions that meet standards established by the Kyoto Protocol and offset emissions from projects that would otherwise not exist.

We’re also looking for more ways to reduce our resource usage around the office and the data center. We’ve switched to using coffee cups made from fully renewable resources. In the last couple of years we’ve also been deploying many more servers with notoriously power-efficient AMD processors. As processor and server technology continues to evolve we’ll follow the path of power efficiency. It just makes sense!

And because Los Angeles is so large we’ve also got two offices on either side of the expanding megalopolis to ensure our employees spend less time sitting in traffic and more time not polluting.

“Big deal, DreamHost! Yahoo’s already carbon neutral! You missed out on the PR train to Happytown.”

Yeah well, Yahoo’s cool and all…but they’re not carbon neutral YET and so their train is broken down between Happytown and Pollutiontown! They’re still brown! Here’s a clown!

It only took us three days to go from “Hey let’s do this” status to “Hey it’s done!” status. Three days and several thousand dollars, but that’s another story. You don’t have to be a tree-hugger to appreciate the value of renewable energy and you don’t have to charge a premium for your services to afford it, either.

Every single DreamHost customer now benefits from our carbon neutral status. If you’re a DreamHost customer trying to reduce your footprint on the environment, rest assured that your hosting is taken care of! You are welcome!

Maybe you want to brag about how green your hosting is. We can hardly blame you! We’ve made some images below to help with that.

If you run into any of these icons in your web travels, click them! You’ll be taken to a page that’ll confirm (or deny) that the site is hosted with us and is therefore green!

If you’re a DreamHost customer and want to add these icons to YOUR site, just visit the “Home > Green Hosting” section of your DreamHost account control panel for linking instructions.

We may not be the first green web host out there but we’re probably the largest. Maybe we can encourage the whole industry to do it. It’s not really that expensive and it’s worth it!

PEACE OUT!

Build or Buy?

April 13, 2007 on 5:46 pm | In Business, Insider View, Musings by Josh Jones | 33 Comments

As some of you already surmised from this old post, what I was really talking about was pretty simple:

Should we get our own data center?

I was planning on getting around to that eventually, but the post was getting pretty long, and boring, so I thought I’d cut it off abruptly and break it into a two-parter. That also gave me the added advantage of being able to cleverly reverse the post title!

So, here’s the thing.. when deciding whether to build or buy forget all that stuff I said back then. That was two weeks ago, man… ancient history! This is the blogosphere, woman!

Build vs. Buy is not about focusing on your core strengths at all! It’s really just the simple question: “If I build it myself, will it be cheaper?”

But, what is meaning, cheaper?

Cheaper, is meaning, what is your return on investment (that’s ROI for those MBAs in the H.) if you decide to build something instead of buy it?

Sometimes, you should build something even if it costs more than buying it, because maybe by doing it yourself you’re going to do it better, and doing it better results in either lower costs or higher revenues… eventually. It’s all just ROI.

It seems pretty clear that building our own data center would eventually save us money, but the question is when? And more importantly to you, the question is also when will it save YOU money?

The answer to that is of course never. All that saved money is going to escorts and liposuction… FOR ME US!

But anyway, um, who gets the money is irrelevant, right? I think we can all agree that money intrinsically needs to be saved!

Mooooving right along. When you need just one of something, you should definitely buy it if you can. There’s no way you’re going to be able to do it cheaper than the product already on the market in your very first try.

As any fool can plainly see, the solution to the “build vs. buy question” has everything to do with quantity. The more you need, the more you need to build.

“Thank you, Captain Obvious.”

Well, yeah. I dunno, there hasn’t been a blog post in like two weeks, okay? And I haven’t done a lot of thinking recently.

But, even though it’s all just about quantity, “build vs. buy” is still an interesting topic! Because it’s really about how much quantity.

Google didn’t build their own data center when they only had indexed two sites.
Walmart didn’t own their own trucks when they only had two stores.
McDonald’s didn’t own their own potato farms when they only had two served.

The more of something you need, the better the ROI of building it yourself gets!

For example, even though you pay much less for floor space when you build out your own data center, you also generally have to get a lot (several thousand square feet) of floor space upfront, whereas when you colo you can buy floorspace in chunks effectively as small as one square foot!

Buying (or renting) your own data center may be five times cheaper per square foot, but that doesn’t do you a whole lot of good when you’re forced to buy 100 times more than you actually need!

And it’s the same sort of math with everything else you need to build out a data center. When you’re small, you probably don’t need the full capacity of a UPS module, a generator, or a cooling system. Those things are all very expensive, and unfortunately not sold in fractional pieces! You’re also going to need some expertise in nitty-gritty data center stuff.

Stuff like city grid electricity. Air Conditioning. Air flow. Network conduits. Real estate. Installing racks, cages, and ladders and making them seismically safe. Fire supression. Physical security. And uh, I think that’s about it?

People who are good at all that stuff are also very expensive. Fortunately, they are sort of sold in fractional pieces, as consultants… but really it’d be best to have at least one on your full-time staff.

As you get bigger, it’s worth it to do more.

That’s why large large large companies like McDonald’s are “vertically integrated” to the max.. they don’t just own the potato farms; they own the slaughterhouses, the land their restaurants are on, the paper mills that make their napkins, and I assume salt factories and ketchup mines too. They build it ALL.

Starting out though, companies are “horizontally integrated”.. anything they can buy, they do. At places like eMachines, or tiny webhosts, or Westinghouse TVs.. everything but the brand itself is outsourced. When you’re new and small, you’ve got to be nimble and you’ve got to be thrifty. Without the volume, you can’t afford all the capital expense and time investment it takes to make every last tiny sub-component of your business profitable. You especially can’t afford the time.

But in time, things change.

I’d even say that change is one of the most interesting things about growing a business: the slow, inevitable, and continual move “up the food chain”. It’s also one of the most difficult things about growing a business. Because in order to compete, you’re forced to constantly delve into new fields you never considered critical, interesting, or even knew existed back when you thought New Dream Network was just going to make web pages for campus security for the next ten years.

And each time you take another step up that “vertical integration” ladder, it’s a risky proposition. You’re getting into an entirely new line of business. A business with unforseen expenses, risks, and rewards. A business you probably know nothing about but your vendors (now known as “your competitors”) have been doing for decades. And despite all the research, research, research you do, you’ll never really understand what you’ve gotten into until it’s waaaay too late to back out.

It’s scary stuff!

But please don’t be discouraged! One thing I’ve learned so far… if your vendors can do it, you can too. After all, vendors are all idiots, right?

I mean, just look at your web hosting vendor.