April 22 is an annual, worldwide celebration of the only home we’ve ever known—the planet Earth. In addition to being the one place you and everyone you’ve ever known has ever lived, the Earth has offered us countless marvels and resources. And it’s about time we started to be a bit more generous to the Earth in return.
For our part, Gandi is involved in a few different ecological, ethical, and environmental activities while at the same time supporting projects and associations that share our values.
Earth Day is everyday at Gandi
Gandi has always sought not just to be a good company in how we treat our users, but also to be a good citizen of the world. As such, we are aware of the environmental impact of our activities. The web eats up a lot of energy. Here are some of things we’ve undertaken at Gandi to help counteract the impact
- We operate our own servers but we lease the space we use
- The partners we’ve selected to rent our server rooms from are committed to finding ways to cut down their carbon footprint and innovate new green solutions:
– One of our main datacenters, in Luxembourg, is run by Luxconnect, who use free cooling and hydroelectricty to keep the datacenter temperature-controlled and powered. You can read more on their website.
– Our other provider, Equinix, who we use in France, the US, and Japan, ensures their buildings are up-to-date with the latest energy efficient technology (like free cooling) and prioritizes sourcing electricity from local and renewable energy sources. You can read more on Equinix’s website. - The type of hosting we use for ourselves is equally energy-efficient and oriented towards reducing our carbon footprint:
Virtualization helps us use less resources since you can scale the amount of resources allocated in real time. As a general rule, we virtualize several services on a single machine rather than dedicating a single machine per service. That lets us avoid having machines running, waiting to be used.
- Finally, with regards to our internal policies, we strive to reduce as much as possible the maximum our use of excess packaging and paper and we deliberately focus on reusable products in the amenities we provide to our employees, providing access to filtered water—still or sparkling—as opposed to pre-packaged water.
Gandi Supports
For more than a decade, Gandi has developed a “Gandi Supports” program to support projects we believe in in ways ranging from monthly donations to opening up our office space to providing technical collaborators from our technical team. We help associations, companies, and alternative projects that share our ethics and values, including environmentalism, Open Source projects, and those who are helping democratize the internet and technology by protecting our digital rights or expanding access.
Some examples include:
- Seashepherd, who protect marine animals threatened by industrial-scale fishing, like whales
- World Wildlife Fund who conserve nature and protects the diversity of life on Earth
- L214, who workson defending animal rights in the context of horticulture
- Tela Botanica, who spread information about plant biodiversity in order to better preserve it, and have an impressive, collaborative database for French botanists
- Graines de Troc, a seed swapping site, that connects gardeners using organic, heirloom seeds
- Melliferra, who do research on bees to help encourage and defend apiculture and stop the use of pesticides that harm bees
FIDH and Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) are also among those projects we support that work to help preserve our planet.
We are proud to be able to lend our technical, financial, and human support to these projects and we’ll continue to do whatever is in our power to advance ecological projects that will help save the Earth and all its inhabitants—human, animal, plant, and more. You can read more about the projects we support at https://www.gandi.net/en/gandi-supports
This Earh Day, if you’ve got a project that will help protect the Earth and the diversity of life on it, you can take advantage with a promotion on .earth domain names which runs until May 31, 2019. And feel free to tell us about your project by emailing non-profit@gandi.net! Happy Earth Day!
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