Sustainable Hosting

Hosting plays a big part of that. Huge data centres, running on cheap and un-environmentally friendly energy, contributing to the deterioration of our planet.

Recently at Thursday, we’ve challenged ourselves on this. We are keen to make a difference in what we do, both for our clients, helping them to grow and fulfil their ambitions but also a difference to the community around us and the planet that we live on. We felt we needed to do more.

That’s not been easy, we’ve been using DigitalOcean as our preferred hosting partner for the past 3 years and we love them: as a service they are fantastic, we love the speed, cost and simplicity of everything that they provide. As a hosting provider, we’ve never come across a service that is as easy to use. Moving away from DigitalOcean would never be an easy thing for us to do, but we felt that this is something that we should do. 

In fairness to DigitalOcean, we spoke to them a few times about this, and they are making progress on being better for the environment themselves, but we felt they weren’t going far enough, we want to make meaningful impact sooner and be able to move our websites on completely sustainably provided energy hosted right now, we felt that this is important.

We set about reviewing and comparing alternative hosting providers. We wanted something simple and fast but something that used exclusively sustainable energy. To our surprise, this is still a bit niche. We found lots of providers who offer carbon offset services, whereby they offset their carbon footprint by planting trees.

This is quite a common approach, but we wanted to go further and find a provider that used exclusively sustainable energy sources

We eventually found Krystal.uk  we were really impressed with them. Their dashboard is good, fast & straightforward and their support team is really helpful too. But best of all, we were really impressed with their emphasis on the environment. All of their data centre energy is completely powered by renewable energy, and they are leading the way in other ways of protecting our planet.

As of last month, our website is now hosted completely on sustainable energy hosting. We’re trialling this with our own website with the aim of gradually moving more client websites across.