Green Hosting – What to Look for
Many people will try to green every area of their lives to make sure they live sustainably. If they also run their own website then one area that they may not have given any thought to is the emissions coming from their website hosting. Often they are unaware that hosting has an incredibly large effect on the environment and emissions, with most servers creating the same sorts of levels of emissions as SUV’s and with the data centers that they sit in often taking more electricity than 35,000 homes. Another, more personal way of looking at it is that your website is hosted on a server that emits over 13 tons of CO2 per annum. What is worse is that levels are on the rise. Internet use in the USA is constantly doubling and the total spend on electricity for servers alone comes to about $3 billion. Worldwide it is somewhere in the region of $8 billion – indeed it has been estimated that at current rates energy consumption for the hosting industry will, by 2020, create more pollution than that of the airline industry.
This is why if you care about the environment it is time for you to look into green hosting. Whether you consider yourself an ethical individual or whether you are a business that has put sustainability and ethics at the heart of your business, green hosting is an important step. And the first place to start is to choose hosting companies who are taking the first steps to improve the situation and to bring down their own CO2 emissions. At the moment there are no magic bullets – hosting does require significant energy use – but some companies are trying to improve their efficiency in a couple of ways.
First of all, look for a hosting company that has chosen to use the latest green servers. Modern green servers can now produce 20% less emissions and when you are talking about massive numbers of servers in data centers that can make a real and genuine reduction. As well as this, a number of these hosting companies will also boost their green credentials by offering tree planting schemes to also offset some of their output. Again, this is not the ultimate solution and we will need to find better answers, but in the meantime, these are the companies to go for.
Alex is a freelance journalist and financial blogger. He loves to write about baseball and jazz but spends most of his days writing about mortgages and umbrella companies .
