After the line "it runs on top of Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform which means it is powered by dirty CO2 spurting coal power plants" i stopped reading..
Why do you dismiss this? I didn't investigate into it, but does Amazon not run its infrastructure on coal power?
Anyway, if Amazon does, then what the OP did was justified in their own ideals. While most of us do not think in this direction while hosting a webapp, there are some organizations and companies who have made being eco-friendly as one of their pillars. Let's be respectful of everyone's motives and ambitions.
> Many AWS customers have workloads with latency requirements that require they be hosted near their customers. [...] we locate AWS datacenters in places that allow companies to get the latencies they require.
> Both the Oregon and GovCloud Regions use 100% carbon-free power. AWS customers who want to operate in a Region that uses 100% carbon-free power can select one of these two Regions. We will continue to work hard on our own, and alongside our power providers all over the world, to offer our services in an environmentally friendly way in all of our Regions.
So if latency is important to you, there's an AWS Region for that. If carbon-free power is important to you (and maybe heroku could pass this through?), there's an AWS Region for that.
I'm very interested in reducing my environmental impact (``carbon footprint''), but hyperbolic, loaded language like that really doesn't make me want to sign up with Cleanweb. It actually has the opposite effect.
Data center power consumption is a real issue and it makes sense that a website for renewable energy projects will itself run 'green'. I for one, upvoted this story, as I hope it raises awareness that, yes, the greenhouse effect still exists, and fossil fuels are harmful to people.
Also, even though natural gas seems to be growing faster than coal in terms of electricity generation, gas isn't green, it's just "greener" than coal.
I agree with what you're saying, and I agree that there's a need to cut the use of polluting power-sources to run data-centres, but I really, really dislike the way it's being put across here.
Hyperbolic, emotionally charged phrasing like ``dirty CO2 spurting coal power plants'' makes it far, far too easy for people to dismiss the author of the piece as some sort of tree-hugging hippie wingnut with an agenda. What was wrong with keeping it simple with something like, ``coal-fired power plants''?
tl;dr You left Heroku because they run on EC2 which uses too much power in your opinion, and bought a VPS from a green host and set up your own webserver.
Seems to me a bit more like a statement about EC2 datacenter power consumption relative to other large companies than actually migrating from Heroku to another platform.
This isn't a post about using EC2 using too much power.
Energy and emissions aren't the same thing.
You can have an efficient datacentre that still emits CO2 because it's powered by coal.
Conversely you can have a less efficient datacentre that runs on geothermal, that will have vastly lower CO2 emissions.
If you want to decouple the nice things we talk about on here (PaaS, IaaS and suchlike) from the bad things (climate change, pollution from burning tonnes of coal etc. ), then finding away to generate power without releasing loads of CO2 helps.
Tom Raftery has a nice slideshare outlining some of the issues here - if you've made this far to read the comments, it's worth skimming over it.
Seriously are you kidding me?