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Ethical web hosting

So what is ethical web hosting?

This is a good question and one which we asked ourselves many years ago when looking for ethical suppliers of all types. Different people have different moral values and ethics, so all we have is our own opinions and ethos. For us, the main areas of consideration when seeking an ethical web host were as follows - (in brackets we indicate our preferred option).

  1. the company structure (co-operative governance)
  2. environmental concerns (certified carbon neutral data centres)
  3. technology (open source software and low energy hardware)
  4. supply chain (using co-ops and ethical suppliers)
  5. operational transparency (clarity of data retention and operational issues)

1 - Co-operative governance

Ecohost is proud to be a workers's co-operative owned and democratically goverened by its employees. We are a member of Co-operatives UK and like to work with other co-ops wherever possible.

2 - Carbon neutral

 Climate change is an important issue and the IT sector is a huge consumer, with web servers staying on 24/7/365. We are proud to have servers in the first UK based datacentre to be certified carbon neutral.

3 - 100% open source

 Ecohost is now offering UK based hosting on servers running 100% open source software. Open source software promotes better security, better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in. See http://www.opensource.org/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software for more information.

4 - Ethical suplliers

 While our interest in our own supply chain lead us to set up Ecohost, it is also important to consider you suppliers' suplliers. So wherever possible we seek to use ethical supplier for the services and products we purchase as an organisation. (see supllier list for more details)

5 - Open-ness and transparency

A common theme through this is general openness and transparency at an organisational level. We want to be clear about how we do business, provide clear ethical policies, publish our experiences to share with others and work together to find better ways of doing business in the future with fairer more equitable financial models.