Server growth has been exponential over the past decade and shows no sign of slowing. The drivers have been the resurgance of the Internet and social media. To this end, cloud computing services have built out the infrastructure to enable server expansion even further.
Still, just because server resources are inexpensive does not mean that technologist should simply waste them. Efficient usage of server resources helps to reduce electricity and cooling consumption which has a huge impact on the environment. In other words, memory and hard disks are cheap but the infrastructure to run these does impact the environment.
One company that specifically focuses in WordPress hosting has openly publicized its approach to high scalability solutions. The approach relies on minimalist configurations that can accomplish 5 times the work with the resources that the typical server configuration uses. The hosting design has the goal of reducing waste.
If all software and software configurations had the goal at reducing 50% of their resource consumption, we could lessen the number of deployed servers by at least 25%. This would be significant in terms of the amount of data center space and the fossil fuels and other resources required to run them. Conservation even with the abundant has merit in today's quest to save the environment.
