The original Green Edmonton web server has been retired.

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In August of 2007, I rescued this old computer from a friend who had just upgraded to a new iMac. My friends and colleagues at the Toxics Watch Society of Alberta agreed to let me set it up on their network. I plugged it in, installed Ubuntu Linux on it, installed the Green Edmonton web server on it (Drupal, integrated with a Java subsystem running on Tomcat), and turned it on.

The process of finding a machine, installing an operating system on it, installing server software on it, and having that server (be it web, database, or file) be the machine's only reason for existence, has been the way to do things in the realm of IT for the past 20 years or so. Of course, it's extremely wasteful of energy and materials. A server just sits around eating electricity most of the time, and that's exactly what the Green Edmonton server was doing - servicing 75 - 200 internet visits (excluding the many, many visits from search engine web bots, of course) takes very little computing power.

So I've always felt a bit uncomfortable about have a computer turned on 24/7, consuming 75-150 Watts of power all of the time. That's one of the reasons that I finally moved the web server to a Virual Private Server (VPS). The idea is, you take a computer and you install special software on it that allows several operating systems to run on it concurrently. With a VPS, you get all of the security and convenience of your own operating system, with none of the power-wasting idle computer time.

Now, the Green Edmonton web server is on one of RimuHost's computers. The computer draws 200 Watts of power, and it is shared by eight VPSs. So Green Edmonton is now only drawing 25 Watts of electricity. That feels a lot better.