I think I can finally stop searching for a decent green host who does virtual servers,now that I've found Memset.
I was after a host based in the EU, who specialised in virtual servers, had experience with open source software, were environmentally sound, and affordable - I've gone the why's of this in more detail in previous posts.
This post will outline how why I ended up choosing Memset, and list a few other honourable mentions from other companies who might also fit the bill if you're looking for similar things to me in hosting.
They're based in the UK
Having servers in the UK generally takes an element of uncertainty out of hosting - and while I'm hardly going to drive all the way down to Reading to look at a couple of boxes, seeing an accolade from a UK publication about their service carries much more weight with me than one from a US mag I've never heard of.
They do virtual machines and they've been doing it for long time:
Memset have been doing VM's since before it became cool, and their choice of Xen, an open source platform for the virtualisation, ticks the opensource geek tickbox for me.
They're affordable
Of the companies, in the UK, Memset seemed to offer the best combination of price and service I could find. In fact their new pricing even looks aggresive when you compare them to US based operators like Linode and Slicehost. £9.99 for a VPS with 512mb of ram (the main resource I'm interested in) is extremely respectable, and when I did need to upgrade ram on a VPS recently they did it in about 15 minutes after me asking them.
They're about as green as I could find in the UK
They don't use renewable energy to power their data centres, but apparently this is down to there not actually being enough in the UK to meet demand at all - I put out a few emails asking around, and was contacted directly by the Kate Craig-Wood, the Memset MD, who provided me with detailed answers to the questions I had. She explained her reasons for choosing conventional energy, telling me that hosting providers in the UK that claim they use renewable will only end up sourcing a fraction of their power from these sources.
This seems in keeping with what I could find myself - the only place in the UK that I could find that runs on renewable power offers virtual private servers is Smartbunker, who've stopped offering VPS's to concentrate on bigger clients instead.
So if you can't run on renewable energy, you can at least go for efficiency, and that's what they've been done. At the moment, a widely accepted figure for measuring datacentre efficiency is PUE - Power Usage Effectiveness, and is measured by comparing the power being going into a datacentre to how much is used by the computers themselves. The closer to one this figure gets the better.
If you have a PUE of 2 for example for every watt used by the computers, another watt is spent on keeping the data centre cool and power going to the servers themselves. Google's own pages cite a PUE of 1.9 as the direction that most datacentres are heading towards for 2011, although they're already way ahead of this with figures of 1.1-1.4 as their average.
Memset tell me they hit a PUE of around 1.3, and they offset any emissions left over through the carbon neutral company, one of largest, most well known (and also one of the most expensive) companies selling offsets.
Other options
Two other UK based hosts who look interesting if you're after UK virtual private servers are Bytemark and Brightbox. Both are more expensive; with Brightbox you're partly paying for their staff's expertise with Rails, and the fact that they integrate tightly with FiveRuns, a monitoring tool to help you see where the performance bottlenecks are in your apps. They also offset the their companies carbon with ClimateCare, another UK company.
Bytemark is the host I used before Memset. They've been extremely attentive to any requests I've had, and were able to answer all the questions I had about their datacentres, other than bizarrely their PUE. They're also well known for being friendly to open source development. I'd happily recommend them as an alternative to Memset if you're not crazy about storing all your eggs in one basket.
12 Comments
Glad to have you with us, and a pleasure to have such a well-informed customer.
Thank you also for the plug!
I just left a long comment, but it didn’t work
Jeez, that’s not good – thanks for flagging it up at least. Any chance you could repost?
Is it something to do with the length of the comment? If this one posts I think yes.
I’ll try posting in three sections:
1.
Great post.
When I signed up to Memset they weren’t quite as cheap as you said though. Weird stuff about what virtualisation tech they were using meant that they couldn’t offer me the same price for exactly the same amount of RAM as what you quoted. I’m now paying £14/month for 512MB as RAM and that’s after they applied a discount following a long email exchange when I threatened to leave.
2.
In terms of green credentials, I’m not as bothered about the geography question these days. http://aiso.net claims to be the only purely solar-powered data centre in the world, and I quite like the fact that you can actually see the solar panels generating the electricity.
Tom Raftery of http://greenmonk.net recently mentioned to me the notion of ‘chasing the moon’ – that is using the cloud to host applications wherever it’s night, and there is less demand on the grid (and often more wind). That’s the kind of thing we’re trying to promote with http://realtimecarbon.org. Obviously this is a vision rather than a reality at this stage, but it’s worth thinking about.
Jamie
2 sections was enough
@Jamie Not quite sure what you’re getting at: we charge £9.95/mo for 512MB Miniserver VMs (I should know – I set the prices!
If you are talking about Windoze, then we charge an extra £5/mo for the license, 90% of which goes to Micro$oft.
Aiso.net? Sheesh, those muppets. Good at PR, not so good at tech (AMD Opterons are terrible when it comes to compute-per-Watt compared with latest-gen Xeons). Also, do the maths on solar panel areas required to power just one 4kW rack and you will see that something does not add up (Google ‘insolation rate’ and ’solar cell efficiency’). There is NO WAY they are generating a significant useful amount of power from their poxy 120 cells. Any data centre that claims to be using local generation for a significant portion of their power supply is almost certainly talking
crap unless they are built on top of a geothermal or hydroelectric plant.
As for ‘chasing the moon’, Tom is wrong about there being more wind at night – quite the opposite in fact. However, it is cooler at night, hence less aircon required which is good. I talk about ‘Globe trotting applications’ as the example of true Cloud Computing in my definition of it:
http://www.katescomment.com/the-definition-of-cloud-computing
We are currently working on something much cooler than “instances on demand” and all that – something that would be ideal for ‘chasing the moon’, but can’t talk about it just yet!
Kate.
Just checked up on Aiso.net. They state that:
Every year AISO.net’s 120 solar panel system will eliminate the production of:
34,488 lbs of Carbon Dioxide (CO2/GHG)
That is roughly 16,000 kg / 0.537 gives about 30,000 kWh of electricity (British power mix). That is a sustained load of… wait for it… 3.42 kW. Maybe enough to run 30 servers if you use free cooling.
Total. Marketing. Gimick.
Kate.
@jamie – Thanks persevering in the end with the comments and general flakey wordpress shenanigans – this is turning into a really interesting thread.
Frustratingly, I can’t find a link to chasing the moon on greenmonk, but I know what you’re referring to.
It’s a brilliantly evocative phrase, and incredibly clever, but there are two barriers I see to it:
1) Support
I’m not sure how support from sysadmins would work when I have problems (I’m assuming that staff who man the support desks tend to work in the same datacentres as the servers they support). I don’t have the figures about how efficient Hetzner’s own data centres are, but they claim to be run entirely on renewable power, and their prices are even more aggressive than memset’s. That said, you’re not comparing like with like. Hetzner’s servers are actual servers rather than VM’s, and from what I can tell, the drives used aren’t the same as the ones in the Bytemark and Memset boxes. I only hear good things about them from Nils Toedtmann , the Hub’s uber sysadmin. But then again, his native language is German, which is likely to help in the event of support requests.
2) Legislation
The EU’s data protection rules are far, far more stringent than the the Safe Harbour guidelines in use in the US, and if we think that that running technology on an amorphous computing cloud that only ever exists on the dark side of the planet is pretty far out, imagine how outlandish it would seem to a lawmaker. An idea like this is miles ahead of where legislation currently is, and I can’t see this changing any time soon.
@kate – thanks for adding those calcs on the AISO.net. There’s a huge amount of misleading information about renewable power provided by hosting companies, and the energy sector in general, and it’s deeply frustrating when trying to source IT services in a responsible fashion.
However, I’ll have to back Jamie up about the pricing of servers with Memset.
I’ve just been billed a little over £30 this month for a 1 gb virtual machine, and when I last checked one of my clients was also grandfathered in paying around £15 for a 256mb vps too.
In both cases these are machines bought before the recent price cuts, (the 1 gb machine started out as a miniserver128 before I upped the ram for a recent rails app deployment), and I can see how this might happen, because there different ways to allocate resources to a virtual machine.
This snippet from an email convo with the support staff when I saw the price changes seems to confirm this:
In any case, these prices are still comfortably lower than competitors, but as a customer, this has been a cause of confusion for me:
I’d probably be happier paying less for a new VM with more ram (who wouldn’t?), but it seems the only way to do this at the time was to manually move everything off the old VM and rebuild from scratch on the new bigger VM.
The hassle involved with this migration is enough of a disincentive to make me leave things as they are; I’m not crazy about how over the year an extra tenner each month mounts up, but as ever when running a small business, right now there are more urgent demands on my time which if I ignore them are likely to cost me more than a tenner per month, so things stay.
Thanks Chris for outlining exactly what happened to me in terms of pricing with Memset. I’m still paying £14/month for 512MB RAM and that was after quite a lot of arguing my point (it was £25 for 256MB when I first signed up).
Thanks Kate for the link to the cloud article, very useful. The reason that ‘chasing the moon’ hasn’t appeared anywhere yet is because Tom just mentioned it to me in a phone call, not on his blog. Not sure if it’s a bona fide phrase anywhere yet, but let’s make it so… I think we can have support all around the world – people will just have to work night shifts!
Re. Aiso what we really need is better metrics to define what is meant by the claims – I took 100% solar to mean that their entire data centre is ‘off-grid’, i.e. not using any brown electricity off the grid. Their explanation at http://www.aiso.net/technology-network.html could be a lot clearer.
I’d like some proper clarification from them and others making similar claims so that providers can be compared more readily. Please note that I am not suggesting we create another bloody ‘eco-label’, just that the relevant clean vs dirty energy data is easily displayed and queried. That’s partly what AMEE (my employer) is for.
I’ve invited Aiso to post here if they want to respond to the above comments.
Someone from Aiso just got back to me:
“The reason we can run our data center on 100% solar is because of everything we have done to reduce power. Our desktop computers are thin clients that only use 5 watts of power. Our AC uses 200 watts of power. It is water cooled by water we have collected in large tanks behind the data center. We are 100% virtual which means we can put 70 servers inside 1 server using the power of VMWare and NetApp. We are running a total of 10 physical servers that handles around 700 total servers. PG&E a large power provider in Northern California went from 3500 physical servers down to 25 physical servers using the power of VMWare.
We are in the process of hooking up our small wind turbine which is
powered by the ac fan. The wind turbine uses the power of the ac fan by
sitting in front of the fan. Since it turns 24 hours per day the power
we will get will power of desktop computers inside our data center. The
desktop computers will be on a totally separate circuit than the rest of
our power.
We have solar panels on order that will be going in to separate our ac
power even though it is so low. The solar panels will give our ac a
total separation from the rest of our data center. We are building a
duct work that will sit under the solar panels. The cool air generated
from the outside exhaust of the ac will be ducted to the bottom of the
solar panels. This will jump the efficiency of the panels by 15 to 20%.”