Go green with your hosting account

Posted by: Toan Nguyen Minh on February 19 in Design

Green web hosting is not just the latest fashion trend. Green web hosting is part of the global movement towards a more responsible and ecologically friendly way to live and to do business. “Going green” can mean a lot of things and this is why it is important to define precisely what this means in terms of web hosting.

When we speak about green web hosting, we usually mean that a web host is green if its data center uses green technologies. Web hosting companies are powered by the so called “server farms”, which are many racks of servers on which client sites are deployed. These servers require power – lots of it! Electricity is the easiest way to power a data center but it is also the least ecologically friendly. Because of this, web hosting companies look for greener alternatives, such as renewable energy sources. There are a couple of renewable energy sources used today and the main ones are wind energy, solar power, biogas, and geothermal.

A Server Farm. Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrfaber/247946950/ , MrFaber

However, no matter how hard we try, alternative energy sources are still not as reliable as a data center needs. For a data center power interruptions are unacceptable and this is why data centers have to combine green energy sources with traditional ones. A web hosting company can’t make compromises with the power supply because this means downtime, which directly translates as losses. For a data center this price is too high to pay, so alternatives are to be considered.

If a web host can’t go green on energy, there are other ways in which it can compensate for this. For instance, one approach is to compensate for damages by taking eco-friendly steps. Some green web hosting companies stick to the rule that for every server they deploy, a tree is planted as a compensation. Alternatively, green data centers can stimulate the eco-friendly efforts of their employees, such as carpooling, van sharing, or even telecommuting 2-3 days a week, when this is possible.

If you are eco-conscious and you are determined to get a green web hosting for your site, this is fine. However, when choosing web hosting, its eco-friendliness shouldn’t be your primary concern because reliability is more important for you. Your business is too important to put at risk. 90% uptime is hardly acceptable for you because this means a substantial amount of downtime you can hardly afford.

It might be a hard decision to choose a non-green web hosting but if you care about your business, this might be the least objectional choice. It is true that currently green power is still not reliable enough and you just can’t bet your business on the wind or the Sun. We all hope that this will change in the future but by then we need to be realists and choose a reliable web hosting no matter if it is green or not.

Still, even if we choose a traditional rather than a green web host because of reliability issues, we shouldn’t feel guilty because we can compensate this in other ways. We can live a green life at home, drive energy efficient vehicles or vehicles that use hydrogen and other eco fuels, telecommute whenever this is possible, and so on and so on.

Of course, we should expect that our web hosting company is slowly but surely moving in the green direction. When the moment comes – i.e. when a green web hosting becomes reliable enough to host even the most downtime sensitive sites, we should hurry and choose it. But till this time comes, we’ll have to put up with what is currently available.