Let’s Save Our Environment Harder

October 1, 2008 on 2:26 pm | In Musings, New Features by Josh Jones |

I can’t believe it’s been over three years and the environment STILL isn’t saved!

I’ve been doing my part.

Not only has DreamHost gone green, I’ve been taking little steps in my personal life as well.

For one, I fight global warming every day by making the conscious effort to not recycle. I’m building up a lot of extra landfill to cancel out rising ocean levels.

I’ve even been doing my part to fight our dependence on foreign oil.

Every morning I drive to the farthest gas station I can get to, fill up my tank, then drive home and empty whatever’s left into my local sewer. That way I build up our proven domestic reserves.

Finally, I bought this t-shirt to disguise my true motives from all those real environment-haters out there!

Contrary!

But wait, there is one more thing I recently figured out I could do to help save a lot of environment.

And it has to do with you.

And no, it’s not lame tip like “Only read in the daytime.” or “Ride your dog to work.” Those are obvious.

In fact, it’s something so simple we’ll handle it all for you!

Basically, we’ve come to realize that if we were to upgrade all our old web and file servers onto new hardware (the stuff we’ve been using since May), we could probably cut our data center power usage about 50%.

And, since our data centers currently use about the equivalent of 200 single family homes, that’s a net environment gain equivalent of a small hurricane… but without all the pesky clean-up!

DreamHost's data center this time next year.

Nitty Gritty

Of course, one thing I do hate about the environment is all the dirt.

And, sadly, it’s not like we can just flip a switch and have all our servers upgraded. Not even if it cost $1,000,000 to flip that switch (which it does), the switch is still SO big and heavy it’ll probably take close to a year before it’s all the way flipped!

Along the way, at times things will inevitably get dirty.

There will be hiccups along the way. In fact, we already did a few test migrations and there were plenty. And they were more like throw-ups. I’d like to apologize right now to everyone who was an unknowing guinea pig and suffered from some down time.

Don't worry, Snugglums is just PLAYING dead!

Now, here’s how to make sure the same problems don’t hit you!

  • Make sure your email clients are all set to send and receive email using your full email address! You should have already been doing this for years at this point, but some people are apparently still logging in with the old (deprecated) m########-style mailbox usernames. BOOOO!
  • Make sure you don’t have a .dataglob in any paths for any configuration files for any software you have! That is, if you see something like “/home/.blahblah/username” in a configuration file for something you’ve installed on your website (even one-clicks from our panel!), change it to “/home/username” immediately! We’re going to try and automatically find and replace those for people as they’re moved, but it’d be best if they weren’t there at all!
  • Make sure you ftp/ssh/whatever to your own domain name and not server.dreamhost.com. That’s because your server will probably change at some point in the next year, and if you’d just been connecting to your own domain, everything would be fine!

That’s really it. Other than the fact that it will save energy, the new set up should also:

  • Be more stable… we’re phasing out shared file servers (filers) because they were just too big a point of failure.
  • Be higher performing… the new servers are on average 4x “beefier”, but we’re putting less than 4x the number of customers on them.
  • Save us money… not just on data center costs, but also on our green energy credits, and management costs too (there will be less overall servers to manage).

This would also make a good t-shirt.

Then, what do we do with all that extra money? Well, our original plan was to short financial stocks, but now we just don’t know…

38 Responses to “Let’s Save Our Environment Harder”

  1. vince Says:
    October 1st, 2008 at 2:47 pm

    oh man. i was just going through some old folders this weekend and found my entries for that contest.

    coincidence? i think so….

  2. Jordan Says:
    October 1st, 2008 at 3:47 pm

    # Be more stable… we’re phasing out shared file servers (filers) because they were just too big a point of failure. < does this mean that you won’t be able to switch over the server we on on instantly and will the web and mysql servers still be separate?

  3. Diego Says:
    October 1st, 2008 at 4:04 pm

    We are paying DreamHost customers and our sites are down. We run an internet business and this is the third time this month that our sites go down. We have been unopearble for over 10 minutes now and it is hurting our business. I don’t hear back from support, reason why I have resorted to post to this blog. You should spend less time writing these lengthy blogs and tend to keeping your servers running. Will someone please do something about this? Am I the only one who thinks that servers should be running all the time?

    I’m very upset at DreamHost, I can’t believe I’ve paid over $100 for a year of hosting to have our sites go down.

  4. Micheal Says:
    October 1st, 2008 at 4:10 pm

    @Josh

    If I could make just one suggestion, could you upgrade those Private Server customers first.

    Since Private Server customers are typically paying a far greater amount per month that those on shared plans, it would be nice to be one of those user on a new super-fast server first.

    Thanks

  5. anon Says:
    October 1st, 2008 at 5:14 pm

    Diego: if you do enough business in 10 minutes to make a difference to your bottom line, I’d suggest you start paying a little more for your webserver! Cheapass.

  6. Brian Says:
    October 1st, 2008 at 7:55 pm

    @Diego: If your business is making any money at all then you can afford to spend more than $8.34 a month to host it. Plus, who actually pays $100 a year for DreamHost? Don’t you know about the discounts?

    @Josh: Does this mean that all storage is going to be local, not over NFS? RAID-1? If so, how long do you expect the transition to take? And, can I have your old filers? Please!?

  7. John Knowles Says:
    October 2nd, 2008 at 12:23 am

    @Diego

    Yes you are paying $100 a YEAR for an internet business. You should expect downtime ALL hosts experience downtime! We have dedicated servers at work costing over $2000 a year and our clients still experience the occasional downtime. 99.9% uptime means 0.01% downtime working out at around 3 days a year. Your moaning about 10 minuites on something you pay $100 for that wouldn’t cover the hourly rate of an average IT consultancy. If you need more reliable uptime look into Dedicated or VPS and if your bothered about 10 minuites downtime get load balanced. Even Google has downtime!

    I support the dreamhost moves to better/more efficient servers. Dreamhost is great for small business/personal and community websites but if your likelihood replies on uptime you need to look into a more dedicated hosting option. I have not looked into dreamhost dedicated yet so i cannot comment.

  8. Sjaak Boontje Says:
    October 2nd, 2008 at 1:33 am

    you got a list of clusters that get replaced?

  9. Pak Tam Says:
    October 2nd, 2008 at 8:35 am

    Nice. Thanks. :) Pak Tam

  10. vicm3 Says:
    October 2nd, 2008 at 9:12 am

    @Josh: So bye, bye to NFS? I would love… as our apps running on rails get terrible performance… I suppose you’re going for quad core machines…

    Well I want to see the changes ;D… yes I know the details will come later on… I just wondering how are you going to achieve. :D

  11. Gosherm Says:
    October 2nd, 2008 at 8:30 pm

    Man, my IQ just dropped 20 points from watching that video!

  12. Scare Tactics Says:
    October 2nd, 2008 at 11:05 pm

    There is no such thing as Global Warming and even if there were, mankind will NEVER overpower the environment, its been around a lot longer than we have. But I admire yall for wanting to save more energy. :)

  13. Micheal Says:
    October 2nd, 2008 at 11:17 pm

    I second the request for a more detailed blog post describing how this transition will (and when) occur.

  14. Sjaak Boontje Says:
    October 3rd, 2008 at 1:13 am

    oh duh, seems i didn’t read the article totaly awake:P

  15. zylox Says:
    October 6th, 2008 at 3:35 pm

    If you’ll use the physical drives in the server itself, how are you going to provide all that space to customers? I mean, not that I’m not happy to get rid of NFS mounts, but still. I know about overselling and all, but how many drives can actually go into a single server when using RAID1 or RAID5?

  16. nomicrosoftc Says:
    October 6th, 2008 at 8:26 pm

    university ibm day day england bag

  17. Aaron Says:
    October 7th, 2008 at 2:01 pm

    This is the best-written web hosting blog on the interwebs. Well done.

    And, uh, well done on the environmental stuff too.

  18. randomlady Says:
    October 7th, 2008 at 9:05 pm

    Hey, here’s a thought. Those of us that VOLUNTEER…. could get 2 free or 3 free, or even….5 free domains a year… instead of the one… just… ’cause. :D
    I’d really love to know how to pay less than $100 a year. That’d be awesomesauce.

  19. paul barton Says:
    October 8th, 2008 at 2:18 am

    global warming is a real issue - quite what the cause is is open to interpretation and even more so what we can do about it. But why not save some money on reduced fuel bills along the way.
    Paul

  20. Joe White Says:
    October 8th, 2008 at 5:57 am

    Two questions:

    1. Will we be notified after we’ve been moved to the new server, so we can know when to re-test everything?

    2. “Everybody on your account is using their full email address (not m######) only to check and send email with their mail client.” < Okay, if e-mail config is an issue, does that mean I shouldn’t choose the “early lemming” option if I use Gmail For Your (My) Domain? The way it’s worded in this blog post makes it sound like Gmail wouldn’t be a big deal, but the “Upgrade” page that I quoted makes it sound like you should only upgrade if you use the approved e-mail account in the approved way.

    Just bein’ a cautious lemming.

  21. Ar Says:
    October 8th, 2008 at 6:01 am

    “but some people are apparently still logging in with the old (deprecated) m########-style mailbox usernames. BOOOO!”

    Yes, that would be us. Why? Because our mail client does not accept logins with @ in them. Yes, that’s right. When the switch over happens all of our mail will break. Whee! At this point I’ll have to take all of our mail off of dreamhost, but at least I have a heads-up I suppose.

  22. J. Queerman Says:
    October 8th, 2008 at 6:30 am

    I noticed that DreamHost has a job opening for a file systems engineer for Ceph. Does this mean that DreamHost will be switching to Ceph or just regular local disks on each server?

  23. k Says:
    October 8th, 2008 at 7:41 am

    I saw in the interface that I should make sure that I’m not using .procmail files. Are .procmail files distinct from .procmailrc files? I’m not using the former, but I do have a .procmailrc. What is the reasoning behind that limitation?

  24. Kaitlin Duck Sherwood Says:
    October 8th, 2008 at 9:16 am

    You seem to say that you would really like to go solar, but you don’t have the option of putting in solar panels. Presumably, the building where the data center lives doesn’t have a roof you can use, or something like that.

    What if you subsidize putting solar panels on your employees roofs? Or even set it up so that you own the panels and pay some rent to the employees for putting the panel up? You could then take moral credit for however much energy the panel puts out. (If you own the panel, then you’d get actual cash dollars.)

    (If you do that, you probably want to get some good monitoring software (e.g. Fat Spaniel service) to aggregate the data and help you see how they are all doing.)

  25. Neo_ocm Says:
    October 8th, 2008 at 10:02 am

    WOW! Great job guys!
    Congratulations for being so responsable and taking the initiative to this SEVERE problem the world has been suffering in the last 15 years. I cannot stress enough how important it is that we take action to solve it right NOW! You have taken the initiative and courage to make the switch and become a model to follow for other companies in your country which is great. CONGRATULATIONS!
    For those who didn’t take action yet I assembled the following TODO list to get you started. Enjoy our planet! Heal the earth

    TODO List
    ———–

    * Get information about climate crisis. Al Gore’s movie “An inconvenient truth” or Di Caprio’s “11th Hour” are a good start.
    * Join wecansolveit.org and invite your friends to join
    * Demand green jobs, green energy, write letters to those dirty companies demanding for a change right now.
    * Design a plan for making your company green. Ask a consultor. Be optimistic and they’ll respect and follow you. Explain them how important it is, give them the information they don’t have. Make them buy carbon offsets too.
    * Make a gift for each member of your family: a tree!
    * Drive less, exercise more. Demand greener cars not the heavy polluting american 4×4 trucks. Switch to Japanese lightweight or electric cars (not the hybrid nitrogen)
    * Use less paper, less water, less oil. Just reducing each 5% will make a HUGE contribution. Don’t squander! Be efficient, be green

  26. nadia Says:
    October 8th, 2008 at 6:27 pm

    Good Idea! I will try some in my office

  27. David Says:
    October 8th, 2008 at 8:39 pm

    unlimited Disk
    Used: 3 GB

    … so nice to read :)

  28. Aceon Says:
    October 9th, 2008 at 10:48 am

    U guys are doing GREAT!
    I’m now living in danger!
    LOL

  29. Julian Knight Says:
    October 10th, 2008 at 7:19 am

    NO PROCMAIL !!!!!!

    One of the main reasons for moving to DH was the shell access to procmail with the filtering and routing it gives me.

    So the new “service” doesn’t support this? I really am going to have to look for somewhere else then I suppose.

  30. Martin Says:
    October 10th, 2008 at 9:02 am

    @zylox: After getting the monthly newsletter I decided to volunteer to upgrade to the new servers. I immediately got the message that my account was upgraded to “unlimited” bandwidth and disk, and after that that i was already on the new servers!

    So I can give you some more info about the server I’m on; it’s a quad-core Xeon (E5405, that’s 4x 2.0 GHz) with 16 GB RAM. “df” shows the largest local disk as a /mnt/local, a 4 TB disk that is on a 3Ware 9650SE-8LP; that’s an 8-port hardware RAID controller for SATA disks (http://www.3ware.com/products/pdf/9650SE_DS_101106.pdf). So I’m guessing 6 disks in RAID-6 for the main storage and 2 disks in RAID-1 for the OS, but hey, that’s just a guess.

  31. Randy Says:
    October 10th, 2008 at 11:40 am

    @Martin,

    I found out (the hard way) that I’d already been moved, a mere day after the newsletter was sent out. I’ve noticed that my new mail server is WAY faster, and the only problems I’ve had thus far were related to my DNS being hosted elsewhere, and our email client being set up to connect to machinename.mail.dreamhost.com, instead of my own domain.

    That and, of course, losing the custom SpamAssassin install which utilized procmail. I thought I was safe, having been “grandfathered in”, but that only gave me an extra 6 months with procmail. Guess I’ll have to figure out the forwarding workaround, as detailed here:

    http://blog.dreamhost.com/2008/05/23/what-web-hosting-is-for/#comment-95733

    It would have been nice to do it when *I* was ready, though! Heck, even a little email notice to tell me they were moving me over to the new server would have been nice…

    Since I was already on the new server, I went ahead and “volunteered” to move, to claim my “unlimited” bandwidth/disk. I got the following unsurprising message: “And ha.. guess what? Your account was already on the new system! So, that’s it.. you’re done, nothing more to worry about!”

    Yeah… Ha.

  32. Chris Says:
    October 13th, 2008 at 9:04 pm

    I think the ironic thing here is that I’m in the opposite boat. I really want to be moved over to the new servers and get off my slow bottlenecked piece of crap with 5000000000000 people running random “funy blog XD” websites.

    Alas, I volunteered almost as soon as the opportunity become available and so far nothing has come of it.

  33. Leishtek Says:
    October 27th, 2008 at 3:38 pm

    my friends hosts with you (Xenolegacy) so its good ya’all are cutting out the crunk wherever you can. Its amazing when you sit down at the table & think about things, you can find something that can be downsized or improved. Thank god we don’t need an MBA to do *that*.

  34. Richard Says:
    October 29th, 2008 at 3:05 am

    I found what looks like a really good workaround for the new setup, enabling you to use custom procmail and SpamAssassin on your hosting server. It does require some setup and use of IMAP folder syncing, but it’s pretty well documented - see http://www.unsaturated.com/projects/spamassassin-changes-for-dreamhost/.

  35. makk2 Says:
    October 29th, 2008 at 10:24 am

    “99.9% uptime means 0.01% downtime working out at around 3 days a year.”

    Actually, John, 99.9% uptime would mean that the site’s down only 0.365 days per year, or about 8 hours. If you were advertising 99% uptime you could expect downtime 3 days a year.

    I think the problem with Dreamhost is this– they advertise themselves as providing tons of memory, bandwidth, etc. and then they don’t deliver. If your web hosting services suck, fine, but be honest about it– don’t falsely advertise and then say “well, you should have expected us to suck because we’re inexpensive.”

  36. Jimmy Says:
    November 8th, 2008 at 1:56 am

    Well, I’m all for trying to make a difference in my own small part of the world. We all DO have a responsibility to at least attempt something, so I am happy that Dreamhost is wanting to do something positive.
    Yes, the plans are inexpensive, and i’m not techie enough to understand what some of the comments here mean, but I am overall pleased for getting what I pay for. I have never personally seen my site down since it’s been hosted here, and though I do not use THAT much space in the overall scheme, I wouldn’t mind not having to worry about disk or bandwidth space.
    Anyway, my 2′c is in, and i’m all for sticking with what works for me, we should all know that everyone cannot be always pleased, but I do appreciate efforts made to please.
    Thanks..

  37. Melinda Says:
    November 22nd, 2008 at 10:15 pm

    Ah, Dreamhost. I just love you. Don’t know why especially but I do.

    And so does my cat (the stripedy one, not the black one). His name is Willys and he thanks you for your suggestion to ride my dog to work. Actually I don’t have a dog but if I did my cat (the stripedy one named Willys and not the black one named Jeepers) would thank you.

    Good work, team–keep it up!

  38. kareem Says:
    December 1st, 2008 at 6:36 am

    this is wonderful topic …. i will put acopy of this topic on
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