Brief introduction of green hosting

Green Hosting or Eco-friendly web hosting is addition to the field of website hosting which involves a given website hosting company attempting to prove that they are not having any negative impact on the environment in an attempt to attract consumers. The term green put into consideration is meant to reduce atmosphere pollution by traditional power station and change to use clean power supply such as wind or solar energy.

How to become green hosting provider?

There're many many things a company needs to do in order to be green hosting provider. Several essential points to determine if the hosting is green:

1. Purchase green tags or carbon credits
2. use more energy friendly servers & products
3. virtualization and data center layout.

In order to attract more customers, many web hosting companies launched green hosting advertising everywhere on internet but you do not have any idea if they're actually green or blue. Generally, If the hosting states to be green, you should see a dedicated page on their site explaining how they're green and their efforts. It's huge investment to become green hosting provider.

Top Green Hosting provider

Hostgator – Green hosting since 2002 and it's one of the largest green hosting provider, serving over 1% of the internet traffic. Hostgator ultilize the biggest green datacenter – softlayer. Only $3.96/mo plus 25% discount via coupon "review25off" you get unlimited disk space & unlimited databases.

Greengeeks – Proud to be 300% Wind Powered Green Hosting, it's the world's NO.1 green energy hosting provider who has donated so much for environment protection. Greengeeks $3.95/mo plan comes with $30 discount with coupon "todayoffer". With this price you get  free domain name and almost all other services for unlimited. Furthermore, they will plant a tree for you!

Ipage – a wind-energy leader, their hosting prevents the release of 2,660 metric tons of carbon fuel each year. iPage is now offering $1.99/mo promotional price. This makes ipage the most affordable green hosting provider. If you have limited budget and looking for reliable green hosting service, ipage is definitely the best choice today!

How do we rate the Best green hosting?

With up to date hosting technologies, many hosting grow up green. However, it doesn't mean all they are good. A good green hosting provider is not only rated by power supply but also service quality and many other strict rules such as server performance, uptime statistics, client satisfaction and technical skills, etc

Who's the best green hosting? The best Awards goes to greengeeks! Greengeeks strictly follows the rules to prepare server products as well as network backbones. Either from electricity supply & or server optimization for less energy consumption, their people did lots of research to ensure everything is setup on top standards.

Plus, GreenGeeks has a team of experienced people in handling troubles. Their support team including CEO are pretty active in various forums to communicate with people directly. Their people are truely the best who cares about what users really need.

What really makes greengeeks outstanding is their company policies. They use energy saving offices to reduce electricity usage and eat home cooking food instead buying fast food outside. In this way they reduced plastic pollution with their own effort. As we see, they put the green idea to daily life not just their service!

More About Green Hosting

Actually, no matter if we like or not, the hosting industry is going green step by step. Because the datacenters consume too much energy and many countries have issued laws to reduce carbon emmission to atmosphere. Leading web hosting services already setup their own green datacenters or rent the space from quality green datacenter providers. The best doing is from US service providers where nuclear and wind energy being used most efficiently. That's why US is primary consideration for website hosting.

So basically, if we're looking for high quality green hosting service, US is direction to leading hosting providers because most of them are green.

Green hosting resource:

• Green hosting wikipedia definition
• Green hosting technologies

Sitecloud Review

Sitecloud is pretty new in the web hosting industry. Their CEO "Trey Gardner" also founded greengeeks. Sitecloud is one of the very few well-known cpanel cloud hosting provider. Sitecloud's Load-Balanced Cloud Architecture provides more scalability and reliability to hosted customers.

What's good of sitecloud hosting?

I think no much people even heard about sitecloud this name for the newness and the technologies they used. Till last year, cloud computing is almost a theory and hardly to find a hosting service provider who can offer something clouding, but the story is opposite from sitecloud and it's doing extremely well in cloud hosting. Below are some outstanding features from sitecloud service.

Scalability
This should be the main advantage of cloud hosting, the resources between servers such as cpu & memory are all pooled. when your site reaches the maximum potential such as a Digg, Slashdot etc, the cloud infrastructure automatically put additional resources to deal with the spike and your site never experience slow downs, outages.

Free Site Migration
SiteCloud's Free Site Migration policy will be a huge help if you're new with website migration stuff, their support will help move everything to sitecloud server with no cost.

Green
The same as GreenGeeks which is under the same green technologies and all other stuff, you would be proud the site hosted by sitecloud has no carbon footprint.

What might be the disadvantage of sitecloud hosting?

As the point of view, there're two clear weakness of sitecloud.

One, price is relatively high – No matter what kind of technologies applied, price is always an important point when users search for a hosting provider. There're many other excellent hosting providers who has lower price.

Two, newness – sitecloud is pretty new as well as their hosting technologies. There're not too much feedbacks on this hosting yet on the internet. Although the "clouding" might be a potential prosperous stuff in the future, it's relative new to most people and not so many service providers like the traditional business.

Is there any coupon code in order to use sitecloud?

Unfortunately no, but we do have some methods to get $30 off your total order, please follow steps below:

1. Go to sitecloud official page http://www.sitecloud.com
2. Click sign up button
3. Close the order page, yes! close it
4. A prompt up window with display with $30 off order page
5. Follow it and sign up. Enjoy!

UPDATE: Sitecloud already closed and not recommended anymore for hosting choice. All sitecloud data/clients have migrated to greengeeks hosting where cloud hosting service not available yet. If you're need affordable cloud hosting services, we highly recommend siteground

Aplus.net overview

A deluxe company, Aplus business was Founded in 1992 as Abacus America and began offering hosting services in 1998. Aplus provides enterprise grade hosting solutions for over 100,000 global clients with more than 800,000 websites hosted. Aplus.net is more than a web hosting provider but a fully functional IT group, their service covers domain registration, website design, shopping cart and email. Generally speaking they have everything prepared for your internet business needs.

********************************************

Aplus.net Review – Hosting features

At Aplus service, we're served by three shared hosting plans – Basic, Business and Professional plans. As they advertised – our mission is to provide everything for your business online. Aplus provides rich feature windows server plans to support your web requirement side by side.

Aplus hosting plans provide the exact limits instead of "unlimit" for everything and the offer is mostly the amount you will use on website. They just offer what we really need but not blow off something useless.

The Aplus servers are windows server platform and fully compatible with .net & php mysql technologies. This is how they their service is developer friendly because people don't have to use different platforms for different websites development.

Besides regular hosting support, the aplus company also provides various web solutions like SSL certificate, Logo design, Web design, Business email and Fax to email service etc. Web design is one of their major business.

Control panel, aplus uses inhouse developped hosting control panel software with full control of billing and website services. One outstanding feature is we can login via dedicated user id/password or even social site services such as twitter, facebook and linkedin etc as long as it's associated with the account.

Aplus.net Review – Server Performance

Aplus servers are configured on up to date windows server with enterprise grade hardware setup. They have multiple state-of-the-art data centers in Miami, Toronto and Dublin. The multiple storage sub-systems use Network Appliances (NetApp), Blades (HP), RAID4. Load balancers and servers network is built on Cisco 6500 switches using the latest Supervisor 720 engine. The sole purpose of all efforts is to provide all web services with ultimate performance and high availability.

Aplus.net Review – Hosting Support

Aplus tech support team is working 24 x 7, and… only for tech support. We called in for some sales inquiries and they are not so responsive. Their customer service people are only available during 9am PST – 9pm PST. Means we have to contact in other ways beyond this period. Our editorial experience with aplus support is not so good because the chat is always cut off for no reason, we have to call in again and again. It's not good at all if we want to fix some urgent problems.

Aplus.net Review – Price

I have to say, the aplus hosting price is quite expensive than lots of popular providers. Their starter plan is offered at $9.99/mo and professional plan is $29.99/mo. Although they focus on developers, the price is still a little high because we can always find competitive hosting plans from somewhere else.

What would be weakness of aplus.net hosting?

The first thing is their relatively high price. While every provider is trying to decrease the price to get more orders, there's no change for years from aplus site. It's ok if they just want to maintain existing business but not good for better success. Another weakness is about support. They're not always online and not so responsive to client inquiries. Maybe they have focus on other products other than hosting but they should handle it well as long as the hosting service is offered.

How do we think about Aplus.net?

Aplus is old brand IT service provider, they offer side by side IT solutions and hosting plans with great features. However they're not mentioned too much by webmasters because everybody like cheap solutions. There're many 2 bucks per month service and almost conquered the market, people will also recommend to check out such service because of pricing.

Comparing to other leading hosting providers, Aplus is advanced service provider who has gave up the traditional service logic and started with advanced hybrid server hosting. They target to offer service to business groups who need professional support and IT solutions.

Is there any promotion from aplus?

They currently offer 20% Off promotion for their hosting service. If we want to save money with this host, go yearly deal then apply the following code for extra 29% discount. In this way, the final price can be reduced a lot!