Is Green Web Hosting A Gimmick?

By Author: Edmund Brunetti
Total Articles: 753
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In your search for the best web host available, you might come across a few companies promoting themselves as a green web host and thought it was just a gimmick. With everyone getting in on the “green” mentality today, it’s easy to see why business owners would think the same about web hosts. However, web hosting is one area in which green is no gimmick – as long as you know what to look for.

Web hosting data centers require a massive amount of energy in order to run everything within them. Web servers are powerful machines that need to be running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; and web hosts have many, many web servers to operate. In addition to that they also have other equipment that require a great deal of energy to run; as well as powering the data center itself with lights and heat. The use of all this energy has a very harmful impact on the environment, and some web hosts employ green technologies to reduce these harmful effects, and the use of non-renewable resources.

These technologies might include things such as wind turbines, solar panels, energy-saving equipment, and other technologies that ...
... don’t leave a carbon footprint and reduce carbon emissions. Often web hosts will also employ certain practices around their data centers, such as stacking the servers in a particular fashion so that the heat generated from them is collected and then fed back through the HVAC system. That heat from the servers, which would otherwise be wasted is being reused, which means that the amount of energy required is cut in half.

Some web hosts can’t afford, or don’t have the space available to create or install these technologies, and so they purchase renewable energy from an energy supplier. It’s in cases like these when customers often become confused, thinking that because energy is being purchased, it’s not really “going green.”

However, this is not true. It doesn’t matter where the renewable energy came from, a wind turbine or a third-party company. As long as the energy is renewable, a web host is perfectly within their right to claim that they are a green web host – because they are.

Green web hosting is certainly not a gimmick. It’s a real thing that can be a great solution to one of the biggest problems that web hosting in general creates. However, this doesn’t mean that all web hosts advertising themselves as “green” are in fact that. Unfortunately a few have seen how much customers want to “go green,” and so they market themselves as a green web host, without actually implementing any green practices.

Because of this, you need to ensure that when you sign up with a green web host, that they are in fact a green company. Ask them what kind of renewable energy they use, how they obtain it, and what technologies they use to implement it. Only then can you ensure that you’re using a web host that’s doing good for the environment, and not simply falling for a gimmick.

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