No, my politics haven’t changed (nor has my blog template colour) – actually it’s the company that host this blog that has gone green.

In a effort to help reduce the effect their servers and network equipment have on the environment, my hosting company (Compila) have committed to upgrade all of their technology to more energy efficient systems. They’ve also gone further and created a detailed green efficiency plan, which helps them to reduce the impact their business has on the environment, covering such areas as paper usage, waste, recycling, water and energy consumption, transport amongst other things. Compila are even going so far as to organise green initiative events such as tree planting or zoo visits for local children.

The knock on affect this has had for me, is that Compila have raised their hosting prices (slightly) in order to pay for their “green strategy”, with the main beneficiaries being The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and The Woodland Trust. Compila hope to raise £50,000 for these two charities as a result of these price rises.

Why am I telling you this? Well, while I am now paying a slightly higher price to host this blog, I have been so impressed with Compila that I’ve taken the decision this weekend to migrate all the websites I currently maintain to this host (around 20 domains, with around 10 live sites that are very busy indeed). Compila have never let me down, uptime has been as close to 100% reliability as can be reasonably measured and they care about the planet too!

This is not an advert for Compila (in fact they don’t have an affiliate or incentive scheme, unlike the host I am moving away from) – but it’s my firm belief that we need to think of positive actions we can take in our daily lives that will protect our planet. Although essential to our daily lives, the things we cannot live without such as heating our homes, running our cars and going to our jobs all contribute to climate change. In winter, we have no choice but to put the heating on – but at least we can make informed decisions about which energy company we use. The car might be the only way we can get to work, but it’s possible to “do your bit” while driving a dirty diesel.

So the next time you choose a service provider (be it web or otherwise) – stop and think about your planet.

While surfing the internet this afternoon, my search engine of choice (Google), suddenly started to declare that every site I wanted to visit was unsafe.

I quickly realised this was an error, as Google even declared it’s own site was harmful (see screen grab above). Now, I’ve been in IT for a very long time, I build websites in my spare time and regularly use all the major search engines for research. 

But what about those non-techy web users who were surfing the net today?

There’s an inherent trust of sites such as Google. If Google says a site is harmful, who are we to argue? It does make me wonder how much revenue was lost today for those 40 minutes that Google declared every e-commerce site in the country harmful.

Does Google have a responsibility to always provide accurate information, just like we rely on the Yellow Pages and the Phone Book to have correct details? What would we think if we opened the Phone Book one day and turned to car insurance to read all the adverts were harmful?