For the past couple of years, we’ve been proud to be part of “Earth Hour“. Each year, millions of people across the world switch off lights for a whole 60 minutes to raise awareness of climate change.
This annual event first began in 2007. It is now a global event marked in more than 162 countries and territories worldwide. Organized by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), its purpose is to encourage individuals, communities, households and businesses to turn off their non-essential lights for one hour as a symbol of their commitment to our planet through a symbolic reduction in their energy consumption.
We are once again very happy to be supporting this year’s effort which takes place on Saturday 28th March between 8.30pm-9.30pm in whatever timezone you’re in!
Now, as you can probably appreciate, running a global web-based business like MIDAS consumes a fair amount of energy to keep our infrastructure up and running year-on-year.
At the same time, we take our environmental responsibilities very seriously! We’ve already invested in servers with extremely low power consumption. In fact, some of our administrative servers draw as little as 18w of power! We have also now replaced traditional mechanical hard drives in virtually all of our public-facing servers with newer, faster, yet more energy efficient Solid State Drives (SSDs). Within the next few months ALL our public-facing servers will be running with SSDs in them!
We also work hard in the development of our MIDAS software itself to optimize its disk, memory, and CPU usage. Factors which all in turn help to reduce the amount of power consumption on servers running MIDAS (whether that’s on our cloud servers for our “hosted” customers, or on our “self hosted” customer’s own servers)
We believe that everyone, not just individuals but other web & cloud based businesses like ours, can reduce their energy footprint and show they care about our planet. That’s why at 8.30pm (UTC, as we’re based in the UK) on Saturday, we’ll once again be joining in with “Earth Hour”. We’ll be switching off non-essential systems – not just our lights – for 1 hour.
Note: This will not affect access to our main website, or prevent our “hosted” customers from accessing their MIDAS booking systems during this period. However our non-essential administrative systems will be shut down for 60 minutes, which may lead to a slight delay in responses to emails received during this period, etc.
So go on, make a difference and support Earth Hour with us at 8.30pm on Saturday wherever you are in the world!