Sustainability
We might not be the absolutely most secure, fastest, most fully featured or bleeding edge web host you could possibly find, even though we know we are pretty strong in all of those areas.
We are happy to make big claims about our ethical and sustainability credentials though and don’t think you’ll find a greener host out there.
Sustainable
adjective /səˈsteɪ.nə.bəl/
Using methods that do not harm the environment so that natural resources are still available in the future.
Why this really matters!
Everyone makes a big deal about the air travel industry, but the internet emits as much or more carbon into the atmosphere as global air travel. It takes huge amounts of power to keep the internet running and most of it is still provided by electricity generated with fossil fuels.
There are over 8 million data centres around the world and the number is increasing all of the time. Today the internet is the fastest growing pollutant on the planet, with some estimates showing that by 2040, 14% of the world’s carbon emissions will be from data centres.
Our Data Centres
We host all of your your sites (and ours), as well as our mail servers in the amazing Telia Helsinki Data Centre.
One of the most modern and energy efficient data centres anywhere, is is powered by 100% renewable energy, mostly from hydropower, and employs a heat recovery and reuse system.
We keep backups in a separate data centre, just in case anything goes wrong, the Interxion Data Center in Amsterdam, which is also powered by 100% renewable energy.
100% Renewable energy
Heat recovery and reuse for 25,000 homes
LEED v4 Gold; CEEDA Gold; ISO 14001
Featherlight
We take care to optimise our servers and your websites to be as light and fast as we can, to reduced bandwidth and processing power.
We carefully choose hardware and network infrastructure to be as low power as we can, then we optimise everything that we run on it to cut bloat. That includes our sever stack, backup systems, billing system and control panels.
Finally we provide you with multiple levels of caching to reduce server load, and are also happy to help you optimise your sites to be as light as possible.
Ethical partnerships
Susatinability isn’t just about a carbon footprint, it’s also about humans.
We can’t do everything alone but we are really picky about who we choose to work with and the products and services that we use. We want to be sure that all of our partners share the same beliefs and principles that we do.
We extend this philosophy to everyone we work with, from payment processors and domain registrars to the open source software that S4 runs on.
All the small things…
We want to practice what we preach, so we apply it to the way that we work and the spaces we do it in, as well as our servers.
S4 doesn’t have a big shiny office that uses lots of power and heat, instead our team spend most of their time working remotely, which saves energy by not using unnecessary space, and also by reducing travel.
We use renewable energy, have recycled furniture, and we pick reusable products wherever we can. We recycle and compost, reduce packaging waste as much as possible, print only when absolutely necessary (using an EcoTank printer), and our company car is electric, which we try to charge only using renewably sourced power.
These might seem like trivial things, but every tiny action adds up to make a difference!
The Dryadų Forest
Forests are the lungs of the earth, and they provide valuable habitats for all kinds of species. Sadly they are disappearing rapidly, so on a piece of land in the centre of Europe we are creating a new one.
Start a hosting plan with S4 and we will plant a tree in your name, stay with us for a year and we will plant three more.
