What is Green Hosting?

Before discussing the green Webhosting, let’s look into how polluted our internet ecosystem.

The world web is somehow developing more than what we expected. The supporting technologies are also exponentially growing. Billions of websites are hosted and currently working.

What makes the internet a culprit for pollution. I was also not aware that these data centers are dealing with carbon emissions. Hence the green web hosting was born. This thought was mainly developed due to reducing the carbon footprints while working on the servers.

What are the factors that affect the environment while working a website?

Yes, The websites are hosted on data centers are working 24/7. According to Jack Amend a medium-sized site producing 4700pounds of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) /year. Just imagine that a single website can produce this many pollutants and how about billions of websites.

Factors behind carbon emissions.

1.Large cooling systems

2.Failed electronics disposals

3.Higher usage of non-renewable energy sources.

What is green webhosting?

Green Webhosting is a method of using electricity from renewable energy sources and using energy-efficient hardware with the replacement of non-harmful cooling systems.

The data centers are owned by major companies like Google, Facebook and hosting companies, etc. Facebook was invested $210 Million to construct a large data center in Princeville, Oregon having the energy consumption of 28MW for the whole campus.

So they also think of how to reduce the cooling system cost and what measures to reduce the environmental effect while working the cooling systems. Hence they have started to use the cool air from outside and made the datacenter truly eco friendly.

Thus we can say that green hosting is a new way of approach to host websites by taking care of the pollution agents and ensures fewer carbon footprints.

The power usage of thee datacenters is a much larger quantity and some of them can implement the energy production from renewable energies like wind, solar. But not all the companies are concentrating to make the energy on their own. The investment and managing the power equipment are somewhat tedious.

How to be a green webhosting provider, then?

The green web hosting provider can support the companies that produce the electrical energies from renewable sources like wind, solar, tidal.

There are so many companies that are producing electricity by means of wind or solar power.

The green webhosting companies are purchasing the certificates more than the electricity they are using for the day to day operations.

There are 2 types of certificates provided by the companies

Renewable Energy Certificates (REC)

These certificates are commonly known as green tags. After purchasing these certificates the hosting providers can use green tags with their websites. The purchasing of the certificates can be calculated by measuring the average electricity used by the datacenter and purchasing the certificates 2x or 3x times of calculated energy, which is using by them.

Carbon Offset Certificates (VER)

The REC strictly looking into energy production and VER is mainly looking for carbon emissions.

The VER issuing authority ensures the carbon emissions are as per the norms.

The working of servers and high-end cooling systems will be tested and issuing the VER.

Best green Webhosting companies

Now we are going to see the hosting companies that are really using this green webhosting methods.

GreenGeeks

GreenGeeks are well-known Webhosting company who was highly promoting their green hosting approaches.

They collaborated with Bonneville Environmental Foundation to purchase green tags 3 times their power usage.

DreamHost

DreamHost is another major company, which hosted 1.5M+ websites and 750k+ WordPress hostings currently.

They had purchased Renewable Energy Certificates (REC) and certified with Carbon Offset Certificates (VER).

After searching the green badging on their websites, actually I couldn’t find any. But some of the declarations can be found regarding the datacenters.

The DreamHost office itself LEED platinum energy certified. Using LED lights they ensures low mercury usage.

The datacenters are energy-efficient cooling systems and less power consumed hardwares.

A2 Hosting

The A2 Hosting company implemented methods to reduce the CO2. The employees of theirs mostly working from home and daily traveling co2 emission are significantly reduced. The older hardware is reused for dedicated tasks or internal implementations. For a particular month, they announce planting 3 trees for every hosting package.

A2hosting is collaborated with Carbonfund.org to offset carbon footprints. Traditional HDD was replaced with SSD.

InMotions Hosting

Let’s Look into what are the green hosting methods are adopted by the InMotion Hosting company.

Since 2010 they concentrated on green methods to limit carbon emissions. They constructed a Green datacenter in LA with intelligent cooling systems. In which they replaced the traditional cooling system with Computer Room Air Conditioners (CRACs). The system uses the outside cooled air for cooling the servers.

The approach reduced the energy cost by 70% and around 2000 pounds /year carbon emissions reduced.

Final thoughts

Do you like green hosting concepts? Then ask for green web hosting and make a move towards saving the earth.