Surf a Greener Internet with Green Web Hosting

It probably never crossed your mind how much power “the Internet” consumes every single day. Take Google for instance. It’s estimated that they are running over 450,000 servers just to process billions of search queries per day. To power all that, they spend US$24 Billion Million each year on electricity which is a whopping 240 megawatt annual electric consumption.

I did some search on Internet statistics and found out that there are about 10 million servers that are actually connected to the Internet. Now, that definitely would suck-in huge amount of power. Since fossil fuel is used to generate 70% to 80% of electricity worldwide, several tons of CO2 are dumped into the atmosphere just to run the Net.

Recently, I’ve encountered a bunch of Green Web Hosting Companies. They define themselves as web hosting companies that uses “green electricity,” electricity that is generated using renewable sources like wind turbines and solar panels.

Elfon for example is 100% wind powered. They state that by hosting your website with them, you’re helping to prevent the release of over 120 tons of carbon dioxide per year, conserve about 48,000 gallons of water and save about 60 tons of coal.

A couple of months ago, one of the more famous hosting companies around, Dreamhost announced that they are carbon neutral. All their 400,000 hosted domains are now green. For the moment, Dreamhost is not actually running their servers on 100% solar or wind but by being carbon neutral they can offset their carbon footprint. That’s a mouthful so here’s their explanation.

Organizations large and small are constantly working on reducing their environmental emissions to meet government-imposed (and self-imposed) emissions caps. When they do so a neutral third party then steps in to verify the reduction and issues what are known as “emission reduction credits”.

Companies like DreamHost can purchase these credits which are then immediately retired on their behalf. This effectively takes them off the market and the money goes toward funding further emission reduction projects. We are not currently able to actually power our servers with the wind or the sun, and this is the next best thing!

Another UK-based hosting company, Green Web Host, not only is carbon neutral but they go the extra mile by planting a tree for every broadband and web hosting customer.

Compiled list of green web hosting companies

www.greenwebhost.net
www.greenhosting.org
www.dreamhost.com
www.elfon.com
www.greenmanhosting.co.uk
www.sustainablewebsites.com
www.thinkhost.com
www.ecosky.com
www.sustainablemarketing.com
www.aiso.net
www.gogreenhosting.com
www.hostpapa.com
www.locomotivemedia.com

It’s good to see that these hosting companies, both large and small, are doing their part towards sustainable development.