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Archive for the ‘green hosting’ tag

Earth Day Means Thinking about the Earth and being Green Every Day   no comments

Posted at May 8, 2014 @ 10:49am green,Web hosting

turnkey internet greend datacenterHowdie do Turnkey lovers,

 

Do you ladies and gentleman know what Tuesday, April 22nd 2014 is all about? Don’t worry, you don’t have to pull out your almanac or open Google to find what’s so special about, Tuesday, April 22nd 2014. The day was EARTH DAYYYYY!!!! Ok, you may not be as excited as I am about Earth day, but it’s a day that is lauded as the day for the environment.  This could be going out to help with cleaning up an old playground or maybe picking up trash on the side of the road. Literally, anything that is good for the environment is appreciated on this day. Hey, you may even find your garbage man may have a little bit of pep to his or her step.

 

Ok, ok that may be a bit overboard about the garbage man, but it is a day where support for environmental protection is at an all time high. Now, you may be saying, “This is a webhosting company, why do they care about Earth Day?” Well my friend, almost every day at Turnkey Internet is some form of Earth day. How? How can everyday at Turnkey Internet be a version of Earth day? Well to answer that question, I  must first ask a question back to you

 

  1. Do you have electricity in your home/workplace that you used to view this post ?

 

Those are pretty straightforward questions, right? They may even seem redundant as since you’re reading this post, you should have some form of electricity powering the machine you’re viewing this post on and more than likely, that machine is a desktop or laptop. You may be saying, “Yea, so what? What does this have to do with EarthDay and Turnkey Internet?”

 

That form of electricity is more than likely from a fossil fuel. What exactly is a fossil fuel? A fossil fuel is a fuel that is formed by natural processes such as coal. Using these type of fuels can lead to all sort of environmental issues such as Greenhouse gases being released into the environment. These gases can result in harmful effects to the environment and the people within it which results in a higher carbon footprint. You can read more about forms of electricity and fossil fuels here:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil-fuel_power_station

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel

 

The reason I’m even mentioning this is because technology has reached a point in time where different forms of electricity can be created. These different forms can be any of the following listed below and many others:

 

  1. Solar power – converting energy from the sun to electricity
  2. Hydroelectric Power – Converting energy from water to electricity

 

Now both of these forms of power conversion each have their pros and cons, but they also have one thing in common: a zero carbon footprint. What exactly is a zero carbon footprint? The Zero Carbon Footprint is the measure of the amount of green house gases produced by burning fossil fuels. The higher the footprint, the worse for the environment. How does this factor into Turnkey Internet? Well, we utilize both, solar power and hydroelectric power, within our datacenter.

 

On top of our building, we have many different solar panels that convert solar energy directly to electric power to power the datacenter, but not only that, we also receive power from Niagara Falls that directly power the datacenter as well.

 

That means that our datacenter currently has a zero-carbon footprint which is the most effective way to ensure you leave a good mark on the environment. Every day when I walk into work and look at our datacenter, it makes me proud to know that we’re not damaging the environment. That we are helping to sustain the environment  by using outside of the box methods to power the AWESOME datacenter that is Turnkey Internet.

 

You can read more about our forms of power at:

 

http://turnkeyinternet.net/green-initiative/

 

Since it’s Earth Day, I wanted to bring light to the effectiveness on our power consumption at Turnkey Internet.

 

Until next time

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Written by Jeremy on May 8th, 2014

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Growing Up in the Hosting World   no comments

Posted at Nov 5, 2013 @ 11:11am Web hosting

topppHowdie do Turnkey Lovers,

How long has it been? 4, 5 years? Probably only a few months, but with all the exciting things happening at Turnkey lately, it’s been easy to lose track of time. Well, I’m back with a special treat. One of my co-workers asked me to help write a post comparing VPS’s(Virtual Private Servers) to dedicated servers and finally to colocation. Well, I have to admit, it sounded a bit boring to me. I didn’t want to just write one long article comparing those 3 very different items. I wanted to write something different, but didn’t have many ideas on where to go with this. What are VPS’s, dedicated servers and colocation services?

Enter stage left, the Marketing Room.

I went and spoke with someone you’re probably very familiar with, Dylan Youngs. Top 5 best marketing coordinators: Dylan, Dylan, Dylan, Dylan, and Dylan (I’ve always enjoyed saying that since I’ve met him).

Dylan and I get to talking and begin throwing some ideas around. We came up with an idea to compare some of our services to a common experience that most people can relate to. The process of living with your parents to getting your own house. I came up with this analogy on this:

Shared hosting is to living with your parents as VPS’ are to getting your own apartment.

That may sound a bit confusing, but stick with me.

When you’re a child living with your parents, they provide for you. They place a roof over your head, food on your table and hopefully a nice bed to rest your head. How does that relate to shared hosting and VPS’s?

Well, let’s say you wake up one day and decide that you want to have a website. Maybe you have a business and want to reach out further to potential customers or maybe you just want to display some art that you’ve been working on to the world. Whatever reasons you may want a website you will need a place to “house” it. Host the site if you will.

We provide you with a website building tool to help get your website created. We also provide you with different tools to get your site listed on the greater internet. Providing you a “house” and “food” for your website to perform properly.

Next thing you know, your art goes viral and everyone wants to see your site. Some people even want to buy a piece of your art. You reach out to a developer and using the tools provided through Turnkey, they create you a database to allow you to begin to sell your art online.

Your new site is in full swing with new people seeming to view your site every day. New inquires for your art are flooding into your email inbox, but something happens. Customers are beginning to complain about the slowness of your site. Some saying that it takes 15 seconds plus to load the site.

What do you do?

You reach out to us! TurnKey Internet (parents in this extended metaphor) and they make some tweaks for you.

We inform you that your site has “grown up” a bit and no longer is eating baby food, but now is ready for full on adult food! Your bandwidth is increased and you’re given more disk space, however, you only see a small increase in the performance of your site.

Your developer informs you that you should install some additional modules to help speed up the site, but when you attempt to install them, you discover that you need greater access to install these features. Your host informs you that the modules you’re requesting would affect everyone else on the server and as “parents” of the server, they won’t install the custom software to ensure a stable environment for the rest of the customers.

Or in laymen terms, your “parents” say you will play by their rules while living under their roof.

It’s at this point that your site has matured and grown to a point that it’s time to move to its own environment.

It’s time to get your own “apartment” so that you can run and install items for your site to perform better. It’s time to get your own place and that’s when you discover that TurnKey sells these items called VPS’s (Virtual Private Servers). From a bit of research, you learn that on the VPS, you can have your way. You can install custom applications. Tweak the settings and just have greater control, however, the best part is that you will have your own “apartment” which means no more sharing resources with other customers. With that, you send a sales inquiry to Turnkey Internet to gather more information.

And there it is. Come back next week to learn more about becoming an adult in the hosting world!

Have any more questions? Email us at sales@turnkeyinternet.net

 

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Written by Jeremy on November 5th, 2013

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Is Greenpeace Going to Protest You Next? How Clean is Your Cloud Provider?   no comments

Posted at Apr 22, 2012 @ 2:11pm green,New York Datacenter,Small Business

amazon-how-clean-is-your-cloudIt began April 17th, 2012 – Greenpeace ran it’s story about How Clean is your Cloud taking to task some of the industry giants such as Microsoft, Apple, Google and Dell – for not being as forthcoming about their energy consumption and lack of green technologies being utilized to their potential. This story set off a chain reaction of events from Apple, and even GreenPeace activists bringing awareness across the globe about Datacenters and energy utilization. It is currently leading to public protests in front of Amazon and Microsoft’s headquarters to bring awareness on the subject.

Just 18 hours later, after GreenPeace ran it’s report, TurnKey Internet unveiled it’s new Green Datacenter in New York’s Tech Valley Region showing off the latest in both Renewable Energy (both Solar, and HydroElectric) as well as massive investments in new state of the art technology that reduces energy consumption by up to 33% versus other datacenters across the globe. TurnKey Internet had already been working on this new Green Datacenter for over 12 months to release it, but the timing couldn’t be better to help everyone understand the importance of utilizing Green based technology for your “Cloud” and Datacenter.

Datacenters use massive quantities of energy, by 2020 the datacenter and Cloud Services industry will be as big of a polluter as the airline industry. Datacenters centralize power consumption, and help businesses greatly reduce their energy consumption through virtualization and shared/scaling of their Cloud resources- but as you place 100,000’s of businesses into a datacenter that makes that datacenter now consume the power of a small city or town all in one small location. True, that datacenter will still net huge savings on power consumption versus those same 100,000’s of businesses running their own office services or power consumption desktop pc’s all the time – but that doesn’t mean the Datacenter its self is exempt from being both efficient and leveraging every possible modern green technology and renewable energy resource available.

So how does this impact you directly? Well GreenPeace has fired the first bullet quite frankly, publicly shedding light on this subject to help promote awareness for Earth Day 2012. GreenPeace has now gone as far as to bring public demonstrations to protest the lack of green efficient technologies and lack of utilization of renewable energies for some of the biggest datacenter players world wide. GreenPeace’s message is simple:

■ Be more transparent about their energy usage and carbon footprint, and to share innovative solutions so that the rest of the sector can improve;

■ Develop a siting policy that demonstrates a preference to build data centers in areas where clean energy can power the facility;

■ Invest in or directly purchase renewable energy;

■ Demand that governments and electric utilities increase the amount of renewable electricity available on the grid.

We, at TurnKey also share this same vision. Knowing full well that our business model for providing Cloud Services is all about helping businesses to leverage lower cost, higher performing resources in The Cloud to replace their expensive, power-hungry in-office IT solutions of today is only 1 part of the equation. It’s vital every Cloud Service provider be leveraging advanced Green Technologies, and renewable energy or they will be part of the problem (and by 2020, among the worst polluters on the planet!).

So if your business is hosting with one of the ‘dirty’ Clouds as Greenpeace terms it – you better talk to your Cloud provider and tell them what you want, or find a Cloud provider that has made investments in the future, to responsibly provide for your IT needs now, and by 2020!

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Written by Adam on April 22nd, 2012

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New York Green Datacenter Part 1   2 comments

Posted at Mar 31, 2012 @ 7:39pm green,New York Datacenter

Cold Containment Pod at TurnKey InternetAs most of you reading our blog, and reading our news letters know – TurnKey purchased real estate in 2010, and made a multi million dollar investment into upgrading the facility to serve as our new Head Quarters and primary datacenter here in the heart of New York’s Tech Valley Region. Significant portions of that investment were made specifically towards GREEN technologies, some of which are unheard of in use prior in high capacity datacenters like ours.

In April, we will be sharing with everyone a full video tour, and additional information on these, and other GREEN technologies now behind one of the world’s most advanced, and now GREEN, datacenters!

The new cold containment pod system, as shown in the image to the top left provides the absolute most advanced and efficient cooling capacity for massive datacenters like TurnKey’s – very new technology, we have one of their first deployed solutions world wide direct from the manufacturer (Emerson). More efficient than hot aisle / cold aisle – more efficient than raised floors and forced air, Cold Containment Pods in parallel with our Emerson in-row ‘intelligent’ cooling systems allows spot cooling at a precision level never seen in the industry, lower power consumption and eliminating waste from the typical cooling process found in datacenters.

Here are a couple of photos of our on-premise power generation system, with our own Solar Array! Yes you read that right – we are actually powering racks of servers directly from the Solar Array (of course fed through un-interruptable battery systems, backed up by both hydro-electric based utility and on-site generators). The Sun is literally powering our hosting servers for clients! Unlike other hosting companies, or datacenters that may off-set carbon foot print buying ‘wind energy credits’ or something like that- we are actually producing our own clean energy right on site!

Solar Array View #2 for our New York Datacenter
Solar powered datacenter in New York #2

Solar Array Power Controls
Solar Power Controls for New York Datacenter

View Of the Solar Array
solar powered datacenter in new york

Stay tuned, for more photos and the video tour in April!

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Written by Adam on March 31st, 2012

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