Wildlife charity WWF is using third-party hosting for its web site to reduce costs in maintenance and energy consumption.

The decision is part of a broader set of changes which began with an auditing process assessing areas of the charity’s online set-up, which in turn revealed that hosting was the area in need of urgent attention.

“The impact that energy consumption has on climate change and the species and habitats that we look at supporting is quite a big deal for us and so is reducing power usage of our server operation,” interactive production manager at WWF-UK Adrian Cockle told Computing.

WWF claims the hosted service has already cut energy consumption by 20 per cent as soon as the migration was complete and this is predicted to rise to 40 per cent once they launch their new site in September. It is understood that the service will also help the charity reduce their annual total cost of ownership by 15 to 20 per cent.

Under the service, requirements for hardware are reduced as supplier Carrenza utilises a network of dedicated servers to provide the processing power and hosting capabilities needed to run WWF’s website on a virtualised platform.

“We would not even dream of getting into the support requirements of running a 24/7 website infrastructure internally, so we had to find a partner to take that support role. The benefits, apart from less power consumption are cost effectiveness and resilience due to the fact that systems run on a virtualised environment,” said Cockle.

The roll out of a new content management system will accompany WWF’s web site relaunch, along with a sharper focus on delivering more rich media, RSS feeds and videos through the internet.

The changes will demand more from the charity’s IT infrastructure, said Cockle.

“The additions to the web site will translate to much bigger bandwidth req uirements as we are moving to a much more modern content management system, so as a consequence we will have more complex server requirements. Because of that we now have a three-tiered service structure and a number of development servers sitting at the hosted service and we are also looking to expand the number of servers to support our future projects,” he said.