Environment Learn more about how Squarespace manages its impact.
Efficient Computing
Servers use a lot of energy--currently estimated at 2-3% of the US total. We design Squarespace to minimize the number of servers required, and as a result, every one of our servers handles thousands of websites and millions of page views per month. We're pretty proud of this.
By comparison, if you were to purchase space on a server to run your own custom website, you would likely be hosted on a server with only about 50 other websites. Our cloud infrastructure achieves more than 20 times that efficiency, and reduces the power that we consume accordingly.
Green Energy
Most electricity purchased from the grid has negative environmental implications--coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy. The solution to this problem is simple: anyone in the US can choose to purchase clean energy to power their home or office--and this is exactly what we've decided to do.
We do this in two ways.
Our office electricity bill comes directly to us from ConEdison. ConEdison provides an option to all of its customers to purchase 100% renewable energy; the specific program we enrolled in delivers our electricity from wind turbines located in New York region. This cost just over $.02 per kilowatt-hour more than what we were paying before--a no-brainer from our perspective.
Electricity for our datacenter is slightly more complicated. We'll try not to bore you with the details, but we weren't able to directly supply our servers with renewable energy. Instead, we invested in Renewable Energy Credits. RECs are an easy way for us to pay someone else to generate renewable energy on our behalf, and in our case, come from wind turbines.
As a result, 100% of the energy Squarespace buys is Green-e certified renewable. Honestly, we think it's kinda cool that everything that we do is powered by the wind. We're also excited about how easy it was to make that switch--we hope more companies will join us!
Reducing our Footprint
While we're a small organization, we're still very mindful of our footprint and we've taken a number of steps to reduce it.
Office Location
One of the biggest benefits of living in a dense urban center is the low impact of the urban lifestyle. None of our employees drive to work, opting rather for Subway, bus, bike, or foot.
Server Recycling / Re-Use
E-waste is an ever-growing environmental problem. When we need to replace a server, we ensure that it is either given an honorable retirement in our test environment, or else recycled appropriately.
(Nearly) Paper-Free
Paper just isn't in our culture. We use email, video conferencing, and various other collaborative tools, so we just don't seem to need a lot of paper. There are about 10 pens, 3 notepads, and 1 printer in the whole office.
Recycling
We recycle nearly everything at our office, although we haven't yet figured out how to easily compost in the heart of New York City. If anyone has any ideas that don't require earthworms, please let us know!
