Onto greener pastures

Around 2016 we looked for new hosting for our site and other setups for our client work. We—being Erika and me— were looking for a good set up for our client work. Our aim was to find a company that would both be established and reliable, have a local data centre and be ecological. At Wordcamps in the past, we had seen SiteGround and looked at their offerings. They were a little bit more pricey than others but seemed like a decent professional and ethical company. Importantly they also have EU based services and reviews were excellent. We didn’t really need the WordPress-specific packages on offer, but their expertise with WP brought specific server-side functions for security and performance to all of their setups.

SiteGround looked like a great fit – and I signed us up and over the years upgraded the packages for more space to put all of my teaching materials online as well as hosting some sites for friends and family. As we had hoped, SiteGround delivered well. Fast and secure, good site tools and a very friendly and helpful support team to help with the few issues we had.

Unkown changes…

And SiteGround were excellent, or so I thought. At our last webpeeps meet-up, I had a conversation with two of my current students. They are currently looking to get their own to host their upcoming major project website. They had checked on my site using online tools and found that the results stated I was hosting with Google Cloud LLC!?! I was shocked!

What now?

My students know me very well and are fully aware of my opinion of Google and their services overall. Without going into details, I am already forced to have a Google account for work – which was literally created for me (without my consent). This is something I am not happy about at all. For my websites, and the service they sit on, I would not opt for any of the huge corporations. My sites and work do not warrant all the claimed benefits of a huge infrastructure. I might be naive and stubborn in my attitude and hope that I can opt for the smaller companies, support a local, smaller and healthier ecosystem and still happily publish online. I am not interested in using AWS, no matter how widely used they are or how much developers might praise them, nor would I use Google… The take-over of web-related services by the big guns is worrying me. Their stance on privacy and data is troubling and I find it depressing how our choices are getting more and more limited.

In my view, it is not healthy for our society to have the big corporations decide on how our data is handled, claiming rights over what we put online and forcing their will onto us all. I hate how I can now no longer do a search without some AI tool pushing its way into my usual workflow, for example. We are being confronted with functions added to our apps, to the browsers, the searches without being asked. Some people might want to opt-in. But for those of us who would like to opt-out – we now need to keep checking settings, spending time on trying to find where those might be hidden in the ever-growing preference panels of our devices OSs and apps… an utter nightmare, in my opinion. And wrong entirely!

Depressingly, and thanks to Ellie and Niya for pointing it out, I now find myself signed up to a hosting service that made a change I was not aware of and that I’m very unhappy with. Apparently, SiteGround started a partnership with GoogleCloud LLC back in 2020! I must have missed the announcement, which they did via email, their blog and messages in the account area ~ so they did inform everyone. But nonetheless, I am very upset about this and I’m now moving hosting, away from all that!

Spring clean ツ

After looking around for better options, it is wonderful to see how many companies are now much more focused on delivering their services via local providers, offering sustainable hosting and directories are popping up to promote those choices. One example is the thegreenwebfoundation.org — and there are many more ツ There is hope yet!

With my urge to move server, I am trying to find the silver lining here – and make time to re-evaluate all my online bits. Time to lighten my load and refocus my materials into a more logical manner, too ツ

We are now signed up with Guru — and the process of the big move is in progress. Guru seem like a great option with UK-based services, in business nearly 2 decades now — they state they are focused on privacy, performance and reliability and promise great uptime.

And I love the fact that they are making a big statement about being green and sustainable ツ This has of course become a buzzword now but Guru seem to have focused on this for longer than others.

The right tool for the job: Vivaldi and Proton

It has been a few years since I’ve last had to move that many sites, change DNS and so on ~ I’d forgotten how persistent DNS cache can be. I was getting on ok with the move over to the new server but was going slightly mad with the slow speed of NS changes coming through… well, that was until I reverted back to using Vivaldi as my default browser ツ

For our teaching, we use Firefox, Developer Edition – and it’s a great browser. Mozilla are also offering the best resources out there via their MDN documentation, now even a curriculum ツ It will remain one of my favourite browsers. For my current task however, I found that Firefox did not show me the latest changes to my moved sites quickly enough. I had cleared all cache, restarted all things – even used my usual utility app (CleanMyMac) to flush the DNS cache which always worked so well. Not this time… and I was getting very impatient…

Then I remembered how much I like using Vivaldi ~ which has been on and off my preferred browser for general browsing, reading and of course testing. Back to setting it as default, I noticed a few updates – the best one being the addition of the VPN ~ and this solved all my problems instantly! ツ

Browser: Vivaldi

We’re building the most feature-packed, customisable browser out there and we have two ground rules: privacy is a default, and everything’s an option.

VPN: Proton

Experience true freedom online. Gain unrestricted access to global content, block annoying ads, and safeguard your privacy with a fast and secure VPN.

If you’ve not tried out Vivaldi – I can highly recommend it. It is a lovely browser with plenty of customisation options. And importantly, nothing’s being pushed on you but rather offered as an addition you can choose to use. It’s fast and reliable and the option of using the free offering of the Proton VPN is just brilliant. With any new site now, I am able to see any changes really quickly ~ without having to hassle anyone to check this for me ~ it’s saving my sanity at the moment ツ