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Computing

18th May 2009 — Choosing our data centre

Our web server computer is a core function for our company. As such we cannot make a decision on environmental grounds alone. We must consider also security and the cost implications for our business at the very least. There certainly are green hosting companies that we could have used. I seriously thought about Ecowebhosting. However in the end I decided against them for the following reasons:

• Their business model appears to be reselling a larger company’s VPS and offsetting by planting trees. This is roughly our approach as well however I did not find this directly from their website but from people’s comments elsewhere in the internet. This in itself is a lack of transparency.
• I had no confidence I could verify their offsetting process if I needed to.
• I had no confidence I could verify their security procedures if I needed to.
• The whole idea of being a reseller of a reseller struck me as being an opaque and risky business model.
• With Webfusion I can at least take responsibility myself security and offsetting.
• Ecowebhosting also offer a VPS but Webfusion’s is cheaper.

4th December 2009 — Outage

We just recovered from an outage with loss of all sites. This is a bit of an embarrassment but all of our eggs are in the Webfusion basket. We are hatching plans to move off Webfusion in due course.

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