1.  I’ve found over the last year, I was able to reduce my electric bill by not running a server at my house.  When I first started my business, I thought that it would be great to have a server and network at home.  That actually did work well for awhile, but caused my power bill to go up.  I live in an area where electricity can be expensive, and we don’t have options for “green” power, other than to buy credits to offset power usage.  While I did that for some time, I got tired of paying an extra amount of money for electric every month.  If you must run a server at home, consider using a server with Intel Atom chips.  While the Atom is not a fast processor, it certainly can get the job done in some instances.

2.  If you provide web hosting, consider using a VPS instead of a dedicated server.  A virtual private server allows you to take advantage of much faster hardware at a lower cost, and because it is on a computer which has other VPS systems on it, there is not much more power usage.  I’ve found that by moving the server functions from a physical machine at my house to a VPS, it is possible to take advantage of the server doing multiple functions, i.e., doing what I need it to do, plus serving webpages for my customers.  Even better is finding a datacenter that uses “green” power.  Some datacenters I know of that have initiatives to reduce power consumption are AdvantageCom Networks, and NetDepot.  There are plenty of others, but these two I personally use, and they have scored well in my informal benchmark testing.

3.  Some other low tech ways we have reduced our electrical usage include shutting off our extra freezer.  We buy our meat and frozen items as we need them, so we don’t overfill and waste food, either.  We have set our thermostat to 75 degrees to keep the air conditioner from turning on as much.  This summer, although being cooler, our power bill has dropped quite a bit compared to last year.

4.  Another means of being socially responsible is in teaching others about software engineering and other related disciplines.  Those of us who know how to make technology “work” should at leave give back some of our knowledge to the community for free.  I’m still struggling to figure out the best way to do that, so if any of my readers have an idea, please feel free to comment.  Especially teaching people how to use open source and free software replacements for proprietary software would be helpful.  In our current economic times, why spend money when you don’t have to?  Even better yet, have you donated to a cause such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or Free Software Foundation?

I do maintain multiple servers for my business in separate geographic locations, and all but one of them are VPS systems.  The one dedicated server is a Dual-Core Atom server, so even that system consumes less power than a regular server.  I would like my business to head in the direction of providing web applications, and as such, want to make sure I have the resources necessary to handle the load from a well-used application, without consuming more resources than necessary.