The essence of our business is naturally green – email marketing inherently means less paper waste. For the most part we even keep our other transactions paperless. But what else can we do?
Our servers hosted in Montreal use hydro electricity, which we could qualify as relatively green. This type of electricity is renewable and so has a lower impact on pollution when compared to thermal power stations, which produce electricity from coal or gas combustion, or central nuclear power. We haven’t yet had an option for a solar or wind energy hosting service.
Most of our servers are also low consumption. The servers we began working with were Mac Mini but we recently switched to Dell Studio Hybrid as Apple hasn’t updated their Mini. Of course, these servers are arranged in a highly redundant and load-balanced configuration. What’s interesting is, since our servers are made with portable components, they are more efficient.
As we became more environmentally friendly at CakeMail, George, our head of technology, looked into the energy consumption of the servers. He tells us, “I decided to measure our consumption and compare it to a regular rackmount-type server. For the Mini and Hybrid I got a maximum of 0.4 A, compared to the ‘gluttonous’ servers that each use more than 2.0 A. This number is more than 4 times what our servers use. I tested them both during stress periods, when machines were copying files and processors were supporting a 100% load. Even when the electricity requirements were not the same, the configurations were quite similar.”
We are also working on an email-recycling program. We carefully dismantle all bounced emails character by character, cleaning each letter with phosphate-free soap and reuse them in brand new email mailings!
So as you can see, we’re not perfect but we’re working towards our greener goal.
