Picking a Green Web Host: How to Choose Who Puts Up Your Website for You

These days, with the well-being of the environment becoming one of the top concerns for everybody, many businesses and individual website owners are choosing to go for green hosting instead of the regular hosting services offered by conventional web hosting companies. Green hosting has become a very popular option, especially among the bigger web hosting companies, because it is an affordable means of promoting a product, service, or cause that is socially responsible and eco-friendly.

Picking a green web host is up to the owner of the website. It should not be difficult for you to choose one that satisfies your needs as a customer and as a businessperson too. You should be able to evaluate whether or not the services offered by the green hosting company of your choice are what you need, and whether or not their environment-friendly operations are really friendly to the environment.

Many green web hosting companies purchase carbon credits, which are financial instruments used to compensate for the damage done by the high energy requirements of running a web hosting company. As a matter of fact, web hosting companies use up as much as three to four percent of the entire world’s consumption of non-renewable energy, the one that comes from the burning of fossil fuels. This further causes damage to the environment because burning fossil fuels releases massive amounts of carbon and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

However, there are other ways for a green host to not just merely offset the damage done by web hosting. Picking a green web hosting company that purchases renewable energy certificates (RECs), or green tags as they are more widely known, is more advantageous to the environment instead of supporting a company with only carbon credits. Green hosts that buy RECs do not produce the least amount of damage to the environment. This is because RECs allow the company to use a renewable source of energy as its generator of electricity. Often times, green hosts that use RECs use wind, solar, or hydro electricity to power their servers and other office equipment. Their activities and operations do not require the least amount of fossil fuels to be burned, thus not contributing anything to carbon and greenhouse emissions at all.

Picking a green hosting company can be tricky if you are not informed about how a REC or a carbon credit works. But these are not the only important considerations. You also have to look at the other activities of the company to determine whether or not their practices are really environment-friendly. Some web hosting companies use virtualization, a method which allows more than one customers to share one web server, thus curtailing energy consumption. Others put multiple separate servers inside a single box which has a single source of energy.

Still, green hosts also take the seemingly "small steps" that work their way towards a big difference in protecting the environment. Things like recycling, carpooling or bicycling to work, or working from home to reduce the number of cars on the road are some of the "small steps" taken by green hosting companies to further the noble cause for the environment.