2009 Christmas Newsletter

One of our far-too-infrequent missives that accompany a notice about our holiday opening times.

GreenNet Christmas Newsletter 2009

GreenNet would like to wish all our members a very peaceful, happy and healthy holiday time. 

GreenNet Broadband now even better value

Many you have switched to GreenNet's fast and reliable Broadband deal since we began offering it a couple of years ago.  But did you know that the connection just got better?  We are now offering an unlimited monthly download package at the same price as our previous 2GB monthly limit, just £24.50 per month.  As always you get GreenNet's full technical support for your broadband as well as any other GreenNet service you have it bundled
with (email, web hosting, etc.).  To switch to us and support GreenNet through your broadband connection visit: http://www.gn.apc.org/services/adsl

New Sites

GN's gallery of new web projects is proudly listing lots of new sites this year - with better organised content that's easier to find, creating more impact.  Edited highlights including sites for Fern, Paulo Longo Research Initiative, Women Living under Muslim Laws, Development in Practice, Asian Foundation for Philanthropy and Quakers in Britain.

Many of the projects have been developed in partnership with our wonderful design colleagues at wave.  We've been working together on sites since 2007 and the collaboration has brought a new creative dimension to our project planning work and much more beautiful designs for the finished sites.  Technical advances have also allowed us to come up with better options for multi-lingual content; improved searching that guides users through their search; online bookshops and subscription tools for taking orders and processing payments; and integrated newsletter tools for easy mass mailing to members and subscribers.

Greening IT: GreenNet uses low-power server

GreenNet's efforts at reducing our environmental impact this year have had some modest successes and some frustrating obstacles - searching in vain (so far) for a UK green data centre, with predictable resistance from the owners of our data centre on switching to a green power supply, and no response yet from Dragon's Den to support us in reducing the carbon footprint of our hosting set up.  We know that some providers are using carbon offsetting (buy a tree for each server somewhere on a tree farm) but we've always believed that if emissions are worth reducing we should really be doing it ourselves.  And so we've been looking more seriously at how we can
make the most difference.

Luckily our long-standing bike, bus and train habits mean that we're already on track with transport.  And our office building in Leonard Street has a very good standard of low-power use, low-water use, composting and recycling.  The impact of reduced-energy hosting on carbon emissions is relatively minimal.  For instance, using the lift less often to get to the 5th floor of our building is probably greener than some of the measures we looked at!  Nevertheless, every little counts and we have invested in a new server that saves approximately two-thirds of a normal 1U machine, which is an exciting development for all of us here (not just the geeks...). 

Let us know if you're interested in greener hosting options, and also send us your own energy-saving suggestions. 

New Billing System

We are pleased to announce GreenNet's new billing system which will be on stream early in the new year and will replace the now aged system which was somewhat past its use-by date.  More details on its benefits will be announced soon.  We are also taking this opportunity to review our subscription services to make them more flexible and
user-friendly.  Look out for these in 2010.

Regrettably VAT returns to 17.5% in January.  Please note this will be shown on invoices dated after 1 January 2010. 

And finally thanks to all of you for your continuing support!

We hope you are able to turn off your computers and enjoy the holiday (don't leave them on standby!). With warm wishes from all of us in the GreenNet Collective,

With warm wishes for 2010 from all of us in the GreenNet Collective

Anna, Cedric, Howard, Ian, Liz, Mimo, Marek and Sharif.