How To Reduce Computer Power consumption

= Marc Perkel's Guide to Making Computers use less Power =

Several years ago I moved my servers over to [http://www.he.net Hurricane Electric]. I remember my first night there. I was installing 7 servers. I had carefully planned the transition so that most people wouldn't have known the move happened. Everything went according to the plan and I went home and went to bed. Next morning I got up and everything was down. I had tripped the breaker on the power strip in the back of the cabinet. All of a sudden power was an issue.

My previous host had plenty of power. I had never really given that much thought to how much power I was pulling. All of a sudden power usage was an issue. Although the power strip tripped a little bit under the limit, I didn't realize that I was close to the limit. I was pulling between 12 and 14 amps! Wow! Had to get that down.

So I started doing some research into how to reduce my power consumption and over the years I've come up with quite a few tricks that not only cut my power usage, but increased computer performance at the same time. I've been very happy with the service I've had from Hurricane Electric and decided I'd write something up for other people who have their servers collocated in data centers. This is sort of a colo guide to reducing your power consumption. A lot of this is both easy and affordable so pay attention and you too can save power that would otherwise be wasted.

== A little about me and what I'm doing ==

I have 2 companies. One is [http://www.ctyme.com Computer Tyme Hosting] a small web hosting company, and [http://www.junkemailfilter.com Junk Email Filter], my spam filtering company. Although I host a few big sites of interesting people, most of what I do is filter spam and host email. I also host a VoIP phone system and RBLs, black lists, white lists, and various spam related lists, and a few VPS servers for selected clients.

== Overview of how to save electricity ==