History
Just like in Jack and the Beanstalk, the founders of Denver’s Unleaded Software took some “magic beans” – in this case, web servers – and planted the seeds to what has blossomed into a towering plant reaching up to the Colorado sun. The idea was to create a client-centric web hosting environment that might someday become a giant.
It all began right where it should have: web development. Beanstalk Solar Hosting is an offshoot of Unleaded Software, founded in 1996 and now the region’s premier boutique website design and development company. Unleaded Software was launched by Jarod Clark, now the firm’s president, when he was still in high school and garnered contracts to build several corporate websites. Clark then attended Colgate University in upstate New York, still practicing web development on the side and in the summers, where he met up with Andrew Klein, studying graphic design, and the two formed a partnership to make Unleaded their life’s work. Clark, Klein, now a Partner and Creative Director, were later joined by another Colgate classmate, Michael Anderson, who furthered his studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he was awarded a Master’s of Fine Art. Anderson now serves as Unleaded as an Art Director and Producer, heading up the Unleaded Productions video production unit. Unleaded Software was officially incorporated in 2004 and has progressed steadily ever since.
It became clear as the company grew in the mid-2000s that web hosting was a natural, as the company began building a server infrastructure to serve its growing crop of corporate-client website design and development. In 2004, Unleaded Software began hosting websites, and through the next several years kept adding additional server capacity which allowed the firm to handle web hosting for standard websites as well as those more sophisticated sites requiring a secured certificate for online sales and credit card clearing. Thus “beanstalk,” the offshoot of the main business, began to sprout.
In 2008, the team devised a plan to grow the web hosting business even more and make it into its own separate business. The web-hosting client list was spreading, in part because of the overall web expertise of Unleaded Software, and also in part because of our location in the heart of the United States. Being located in Denver, Colo., for decades the mid-continent crossroads of much of the nation’s telecommunications and data traffic, gives web-hosting companies located here the added advantage of quicker web deliveries – what is known in the web world as “lower latencies,” meaning the lag time for delivery of web content across the country is less here than that emanating from either coast.
But the Unleaded Software team wanted more than state-of-the-art web hosting technology and a geographical advantage. They wanted to make a socially responsible statement that reflected their personal beliefs and their overall business philosophy. And so another advantage of being located in Denver came into play: the Colorado sun.
Solar energy is gaining credence all over the country for the generation of photovoltaic electricity, but there are rare few places anywhere in the United States with as much sunshine as Colorado. Unleaded Software and its hosting operations are housed in a company-owned building in the Ballpark Neighborhood near Downtown Denver, a facility which affords us near perfect solar access with wide open southern and western exposure to the sun all day long. We contracted with Adobe Solar of Denver, one of the nation’s leading manufacturers and installers of solar panels, to build our own electric-generation system right here, and Beanstalk Solar Hosting took root and began to grow.
Beanstalk Solar Hosting is powered by a 3.7 kilowatt solar electric photovoltaic (PV) system installed by Adobe. This grid-tied solar PV system has been mounted on the roof just above the Beanstalk Solar Hosting servers and is made up of (20) 185 Watt Mitsubishi Solar Panels and (1) Frontius Solar Inverter. Taking advantage of Colorado’s 300+ days of sunshine, this solar PV system is expected to produce an average of 410 Kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity per month. Over the next 30 years, this system will use the free energy from the sun to offset more than 189,000 lbs of CO2, equivalent to driving 220,000 miles, according to Greg Koss owner of Adobe Solar. In addition to providing clean renewable solar electricity, the system is expected to provide savings of over $48,000 in electrical costs at today’s rates. Indeed, in the first four full months of operation, the Beanstalk/Unleaded solar system knocked off approximately 50% of our monthly electric bills. And being connected to the local utility company grid gives us two other advantages: first, in the event of prolonged inclement weather, we have the ability to draw as much uninterrupted power from the grid that we need, so there is never any doubt that Beanstalk Solar Hosting will be up and running rain or shine; and, second, our excess electricity generated from our solar system is fed back into the grid, so in our own small way we are “greening” the region.
Beanstalk Solar Hosting is proud to be one of the only “green” web hosting companies in the country, but we haven’t stopped there. Shortly after going solar we also installed a new Solid State Drive (SSD) server for our web hosting, which vastly increased sever speeds and storage capacities, allowing Beanstalk Solar Hosting to host the most robust websites out there, the high-traffic and dynamic websites that require the latest web technology. In this way, as we grow our business, we are providing the most technologically advanced fertile soil, as it were, to help our web-hosting clients meet and exceed their growth projections as well. And we will constantly sow the seeds of innovation
Beanstalk Solar Hosting. Growing the web with the Colorado sun.
