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Green Web Hosting

When one thinks of the web hosting industry, the word “environmentalism” or “greenie” is not usually the first thing that comes to mind. Since electricity needed to run servers and the cooling servers need uses up a lot of energy, many would think that the web hosting industry is environmentally unfriendly. That would indeed be the case if not for this new revelation that some companies are picking up. This new revelation is known as “green hosting”.

Before you jump on the bandwagon and sing the praises of this new hosting strategy that not only serves your webhosting needs but is also good for the environment, there are a few facts that you should know.

First of all, most of these hosts do not directly help the environment by running off of alternative energy such as solar or hydro power. Most of these hosts that claim to be “green hosts” run off of conventional power sources. They can claim to be “green hosts” because they buy “green credits” that go to further the research on alternative power sources. These green credits are created when clean and renewable energy is used in place of oil, gas, or other “dirty” energy. So if a process like heating traditionally took 100 energy units to produce but now requires only 60 from traditional “dirty sources” and can use 40 “green credits” to substitute, then a surplus of 40 green credits gets added to the reserve. Green web hosts can then purchase these credits in order to offset the amount of “dirty” energy they have to use to power their servers and thus evens them out so they do not add any extra pollution to the environment. To find out more about how this “green credits” system works, go to
http://www.cleanandgreen.us/what.php to learn the technical details of “green credits.”

An example of a host that does this is Dreamhost.com. Dreamhost states that since it is not practical to put giant solar panels everywhere to power its DC, they instead pursue this quick method of environmentally friendly hosting. It cost Dreamhost three days and several thousand dollars, but that is only a minute fraction of what it would cost to truly run a web hosting company on alternative energy.

Since these kind of green hosts basically run on the same servers, power sources, and hardware that regular “non-green” hosts do, there is really no difference in the quality of service or uptime of the servers themselves. The fees the customer has to pay might be a little higher to offset the costs of buying “green credits” for the hosting company, but overall the experience should be no different than the traditional web hosting company.

While most hosting companies that claim to be “green” just buy “green credits” and run like any other hosting company, there are the few companies who do run themselves partially or completely on renewable energy resources. One such company is Iron Mountain(http://www.imountain.com/) web hosting, which relies heavily on solar power to operate. Besides the fact that their power source for operating the DC is different, there is really no other differentiator for truly green web hosts from regular web hosts. These web hosting companies who run in green datacenters still have conventional energy as a backup to their solar or wind power as they cannot have their datacenters shut down if it is a cloudy day or if there is no wind. Unless you are worried about traditional energy sources such as oil and gas running out or becoming too hard for datacenters obtain in the next few years, a truly green host offers little extra value to a customer besides a nice warm feeling inside that you are somehow helping the environment and fighting against the evil known as pollution.

After looking at the merits of green hosting, it is pretty clear that from a service standpoint, it offers no real benefits from a traditional “dirty” web host. The quality of the hosting service still largely depends on the uptime and the quality of the customer service staff that the green host employs. The “green host” banner is more useful for marketing than for any other realistic purpose as the feeling of helping the environment is appealing to some people and may be the decision maker when choosing which host to use for their business. Businesses who are hosted by such companies can also claim to be “green business” and use that marketing line to attract clients to themselves. But when all is said and done, the green hosting label is mainly a marketing label and other factors such as customer service, uptime, and features are far more important when choosing a host for your website or business.

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