Naia
We started doing websites back in 1998, when webpages were mostly static, and music was just starting to find it's way onto our hard drives. Since then, a lot of things have happened on the web: the dotcom boom and crash, the rise of social networks, etc. We survived it all, and are still creating original frontends and developing efficient web applications.
We started as a business called dishost.com in 2004. We chose this field and our name because we were upset about the level of service in the web hosting industry, and we wanted to offer something different: quality rather than size. Since we were managing our own servers, we knew the amount of energy that they were using, and we started growing concerned about the impact we were having on the environment We wanted to make a difference. There was no way to get "clean" energy directly into datacenters (and building our own multimillion dollar datacenter has never been an option), we thus decided to compensate for the "dirty" energy that we were using. We started doing that with EAD Environmental, who was investing in wind farms in Kansas. A year later, we switched to 3 Phases. Those were all clean energy certificates from the US, but at that time, no option was available in Belgium. 3 Phases was investing in wind farms in California. We worked with them until the end of 2007, when we switched to a recently created local solution, CO2logic. They invest in different project, mostly biomass, but also wind turbines, all of it in India.
Along the way, our name changed to Naia (in 2006), mostly because we felt that dishost.com put too much focus on the hosting aspect of our company, when it actually was just a small part of it. Indeed, we have grown with the web, and today we can say that our experience allows us not only to build top level web applications, but most importantly, to propose an all inclusive web experience to our clients. Be it ethical SEO (Search Engine Optimization), efficient ergonomics, standards' compliant usability, payment systems, intra or extra nets, localization, we speak and understand it all.
Aymeric Andrieu-Delille | founder, project manager, frontend designer, FOSS expert & all-round system administrator.
Severin Andrieu-Delille | founder, PHP & MySQL expert, he does all the dynamic scripting, he is the lead developper.
Vincent Adam | graphic artist, 3D, static & video, drawing. He works with us for specific projects, he is an amazing digital artist.
We are ants, not elephants
We have always been small, and intend to stay that way. But ants will carry almost any weight. As you may have understood from the paragraphs above, we strive for quality rather than size. There aren't a lot of us, but we are a dedicated team, and we believe that we deliver the best of ourselves in such a structure. We are able to follow projects closely from seed to full blown tree, be it a small personal website to a complex global web application.
There have always been a lot of myths around web hosting operations, they need to be dispelled.
The first one is the 'unlimited' concept. There is no such thing as unlimited anything. Typical bad advertising & marketing will try to sell you unlimited this & that for a cheap price. Be wary of any such offer, as there are indeed real machines and fiber optics at the other end of the line, and those are definitely not "unlimited", especially when you think about real size (volume, square footage) and energy (electricity, heat & AC). Those are all limited and calculated resources. The web hosting plans that we offer try to stay feasible in today's world.
The second one is price. The price should always be right, especially on the web. Web hosting is such a shark infested industry that anyone can (and will) try to sell you something for one euro (or dollar) a year. Whichever way you turn it, servers cost money, electricity, cooling & fiber. We believe that our price is right, according to our principles.
We invest time and money in our servers. We do our research and try to build the most efficient servers possible. We know what's inside them and how much energy they consume. We only use SuperMicro motherboards, simply because they are the sturdiest & most energy efficient today. They do cost a few times more than their Dell counterpart, but they are worth it.
There are hundreds of thousands of servers which are on all day and all night in this world and that only use a small percentage of their calculating capacities. When a server is on, it uses electricity, all the time. The best use for this electricity is therefore to use it for something. And idle processor is a waste of electricity. That is why we started proposing virtulization solutions at the beginning of 2009. It allows multiple virtual servers on one physical server, thus providing a higher resource usage and better energy efficiency.
About clean energy now. As we have mentionned before, it is hard to have real clean energy pumped directly into our servers. Simply because whole datacenter infrastructures would have to be changed. One day will come when that will be the case, because we adapt, but slowly. We thus have to find other ways to compensate for that. First of all, our offices are connected to 100% clean energy. That is one place where we can make a difference, and we do, thanks to the liberalization of the energy market here in Belgium, and to our current energy provider : Lampiris. Secondly, we offset all the carbon monoxide that our production servers and routers use in the datacenters they reside in. To achieve that, we have to thank, as mentionned before, CO2logic.
Those are all small steps, we believe. But if every webhost in the world did this, the impact that our industry has on our environment would be drasctically reduced.