OpenVPS is good for the environment

Today's computing world requires isolation. There are many reasons for this, including control, security, availability of resources, failure isolation, etc. The traditional way of accomplishing isolation is physically, i.e. getting a separate server. As the number of applications grows, so does the number of servers.

Hardware vendors always keep raising the entry level bar, and so today's smallest server is capable of handling an enormous amount of transactions. But higher CPU speeds mean higher power consumption: a 90MHz Pentium consumes 9W while a 2GHz Pentium 4 consumes 75.3W. Even a low-end server these days consumes no less than 200W. Given that typical servers run 24/7/365 this amounts 1752 KWh per year. And because every joule of energy consumed by a server is transformed to heat, you need to at least double this to consider the air conditioning costs, which brings us to 3504 KWh per year.

Assuming that the increase in speed described in Moore's law is not going to stop for some time now and therefore the power requirement of hardware is going to continue increasing, the gap between server utilization and the power consumption is only going to widen in the foreseeable future.

At some point this becomes an ethical question: If my CPU is 99.9% idle, is it environmentally (not to mention fiscally!) responsible of me to keep this server running?

Virtualization technologies such Linux VServer used by OpenVPS offer a very viable alternative. If the server acts and feels like a dedicated server, what difference does it really make if it's actually virtual? Yet consolidating 30 physical servers into 30 OpenVPS accounts running on one (albeit power hungry) server would save over 100000 kWh per year. That's as much energy as is consumed on average by 10 houses!