Green Hosting Secret Revealed
Green is heavily advertised by lots of hosting providers to show their care about environment. We also introduced multiple leading green hosting providers from old articles. However, what really makes up a green hosting service? How people think about exactly? In this article, our editors have done in depth research of the service and will guide you to learn about the secrets side by side.
About Green Hosting
When we refer to green hosting or eco friendly hosting, mostly we're talking about the clean power supply. Means the hosting providers either setup their own green data center space or purchase green engergy from certified provider. Because the IT industry is consuming lots of electricity, the purpose is to reduce carbon emission by clean power resource. The following power supply technologies are popularly used:
- Solar. An endless power source and 100% clean. It's widely used from industrial and home applications. The problem of solar panel is the big investment and less efficiency guarantee. When it's getting dirty without in time cleaning up, the efficiency can lose up to 50%.
- Nuclear. The most powerful and efficient solution. We just need to feed very few nuclear fuel then it will produce out huge energies. It requires high technology and big investment to setup/maintain. Also, because of the disaster in Japan, many countries announced not to build new plants in near future.
- Wind. The most economic solution with easy installation. Logically it can be installed almost everywhere with less cost. The problem is it's not always consistant and only applicable from specific areas.
- Tidal. Consistant and powerful energy source, but is much harder to build the plant. It's also not so easy to find a perfect place to configure the power supply plant. It's reliable energy source but just hard to get it.
- Geothermal. Also a constant energy source, but it's not available everywhere. The most popular place with this energy support is ice land where over 70% power supply is geothermal based. This solution requires high technology and massive up front costs.
For green hosting industry, all service providers highlight themselves for wind solutions. Why? Not because it's the best but just for it's low cost and easy to get. Based the green hosting requirements, as long as your power supply is not carbon related such as coal and gas then it's green. Actually, in United States, the wind power supply is not the primary choice. Because of the huge consumption, nuclear, wind, gas and lots of other traditional solutions all receive big market share.
How does customer think about green hosting?
To be honest, site owners care more about connectivity and availability. Whatever power the server is supported, it's not something users care about because that's business of their hosting providers. When a hosting service highlights itself for green power supply, no much people would like to pay extra dollars per month just because they want to proud of green.
Why there's extra fee included for green hosting? Well, for a decent green hosting provider, they got lots of stuff to work with besides green power supply, it includes optimized data center and server structures for less power consumption, it also refers to how they can recycle the used energy and other tactics to give zero negative effect to environment or even makes it better. Those efforts like planting new trees and advanced server cooling technologies all need man power and money. The direct result is the service cost increased.
Take the most popular hosting provider greengeeks for example, they indeed apply lots of useful efforts to follow their plans. They even build up energy saving office and bring home cooked foods to company to reduce less pollusion to the earth. But you have to subscribe 3 years upfront in order to take the $4.95/mo promotional price. if we sign up yearly, price is $7.95/mo and $14.95 for monthly deal. As we see, the price is almost twice of many other hosting plans. Other greengeeks hosting solutions like vps and dedicated servers are also relatively expensive comparing to their competitors.
For short, to be green or not is just an attitude. For hosting business, you can try whatever efforts to get customer, but you have to work harder to keep them because performance is really what everybody concerns.
