#MeanAndGreen
Mean Servers is mean about the environment; after all, data centers use a lot of energy and in turn, create a lot of environmental pollution in terms of both electronic waste and power plant pollution. Mean Servers has created a latitude of directives within our data center, and outside of it, in order to minimize our footprint on the planet. When you purchase services from our company, you can rest assured that you too are helping minimize your own company's impact on the environment by going with a company that is #MeanAndGreen. We strive to do our best when it comes to minimizing our environmental impact and if you have ideas that can help us improve what we do, we would love to hear from you.
No Waste Facilities
We take great pride in our work place which is why Mean Servers recycles everything. From the cups our lattes come in that we take with us from our favorite coffee shop to the components in every single server, we make sure every item in the data center never sees the inside of a landfill.Cardboard boxes, styrofoam packing, plastic, even compost, it all goes to the recycling center (or in the case of compost, garden center). We have no printers in our office either, everything is completely digitized and paper that we do received is digitized, shredded and sent to the recycling center as well.
Server parts are reused when possible but if outdated, are refurbished and sold or donated to local schools. Hard drives are erased using data scrubbing software that over rides the data on the drive 7 times before they leave our facility. This is the same method the United States Department of Defense advises to use on its own machines.
Green Renewable Energy
Mean Servers buys all of its power from renewable energy sources provided by our local power distributors. How does it work? We indicate on our power bill that we would like to opt-in to the local power company's renewable energy sources.Although some of our energy may actually come from a fossil fuel plant and not necessarily directly from a renewable energy source, the extra money we spend per month ensures the amount of power we use per month is pumped into the local grid system in the from of renewable energy.
Unfortunately, the electrical grid is a complex piece of machinery so it is impossible to received energy directly from a renewable source. In the future, we hope to add solar panels to the roof of our facility so that we can directly tap power from the sun.
Smart Power Systems
If it uses electricity, it's smart in our data center. Our office computers are set to turn off their monitors after 2 minutes of inactivity and suspend after 15. All of the lights in our facility are on motion detectors and switch off after 5 minutes of no motion.Servers without clients are kept off by the UPS system and only are switched on once someone has been provisioned to the machine. Once a client has terminated their server contract with us, the machine is formatted using special data scrubbing software before being shut back down to await the next client.
Our HVAC systems are specially designed as well to pull in cold filtered air from the outside and not use the compressors when the temperature is just right. Humidity is either added or removed when needed to make sure our facility runs in optimal conditions.
Virtualize it All
Most web hosting companies run their corporate website, DNS, provisioning systems, monitoring systems and many other critical services from individual dedicated servers. Not Mean Servers, all of our systems are virtualized and operate in the same cloud we offer to our customers.By virtualizing our own services, we can ensure no single point of failure by utilizing our TrueCloud Technology. This in turn also makes sure that services that don't require a dedicated machine run on our more efficient virtual host machines instead. Less machines in use means less power consumption which is always a plus when it comes to the environment.
What other web hosting companies have spread over 5+ different individual servers, we have hosted on one virtualized cloud.
Telecommuting Power
Most of our employees can telecommute without needing to be at the data center everyday. Software support, server provisioning, billing, and sales, it can all be done from our employees home offices.Unfortunately, not everyone can telecommute, such as our hardware technicians, installation technicians, and network engineers. For them however, Mean Servers provides deeply discounted mass transit passes to encourage the use of alternative transportation instead of individual cars. We are happy to report, everyone at Mean Servers takes advantage of our discounted mass transit passes too!
Green Components
A lot of people associate "green components" with cheap server parts that under perform compared to a non-green component. Mean Servers goes the extra mile to ensure that every green component in our servers, from our low voltage RAM, to lower wattage CPUs perform just as well or exceeds a machine that uses non-green components. How do we do it?Unlike other web hosting companies, we don't buy last years low end server components but always the newest, name brand, most state of the art components that are on the market. The same components some major industry shakers use such as Google, IBM, and Microsoft. This ensures your green server isn't just green, but mean as well!