Jun 20th, 2009
Green Web Hosting
Web hosting requires the maintenance of a complicated array of servers that need to be housed and cooled in dedicated hosting centres. As you will no doubt be aware from your own PC or laptop a certain amount of heat is generated by the CPU, Hard Drive and other components. Well imagine whole racks of PC’s and you have a major cooling down problem!
These “data hotels” require complex air conditioning systems which also use significant amounts of energy. Indeed its been calculated that the internet gives out a much emissions as the airline industry so this is an area increasingly falling under the spotlight. Hostgator point out that out on their website, that the average hosting server produces the same emissions as a 15 mpg SUV.
Unsurprisingly a number of niche hosting providers have started to offer “green web hosting” but this is starting to become mainstream, with the likes of HostGator and HostPapa going “green.” With green web hosting, a web hosting company would endeavor to run their operations in an environmentally friendly.
This should go beyond turning off the office lights and monitors at night! At the moment this might involve buying power from 100% renewable energy providers, who dereive their power from wind farms and other renewable sources. At a more practicable level, web hosts tend to buy “renewable energy credits” as it isn’t practical to build wind farms where the servers are located, or to “carbon offset” by investing in local tree planting schemes to offset their emissions.
Eventually a practical solution might be to base datacentres, where it is much colder, say closer to the arctic circle. This will perhaps have to wait until connectivity can be improved to these areas and when “cloud” or “grid” computing can be fully developed.
