When deciding on your hosting services - make sure you make the Green hosting choice!
Here at HOST100, we take environmental considerations very seriously. We have implemented a number of initiatives to make our service greener and more sustainable without compromising on performance or price. We approach this by avoiding unnecessary use of resources, and minimising the environmental impact of the activities which are necessary to operate our business.
The environmental impact of the Internet
The Internet has streamlined our lives, making it easier to keep informed, stay in touch, and share ideas -- but it's important to remember that the digital age isn't without its environmental impact. As the world wide web continues to grow, with more and more people getting online every day, the energy it takes to keep it going has increased too, resulting in a carbon footprint that's larger than you might expect.
The "net" consists of millions or even billions of machines owned by countless people and companies, this vast amount of energy being consumed makes the internet an enormous carbon producing monster. As small as it all seems, it's easy to forget the real world process that goes into keeping the Internet running. All websites are located on a server in datacentres - a building packed from top to bottom with servers, full of the web pages, videos, applications and downloadable files that make the modern online experience possible. All of these servers require electricity to keep them going, and then almost as much again to keep them cool. To generate much of that electricity, fossil fuels like coal and gas are usually being burned.
Green Hosting from HOST100
But you haven't got to admit defeat - your Internet dream can live on! By just taking us up on one of our web hosting plans, your web site will be just about as green as can be. Our UK datacentre uses as little electricity as possible to keep everything fully functional.
At HOST100, we invest significant time and money in green initiatives to reduce our carbon footprint. So we were delighted to hear that our datacentre was named winner of the Green Datacentre Project of the Year category in the 2012 Datacentre Solutions Awards.
In the typical datacentre, a huge amount of energy is used to keep the servers cool - generally this is because inefficient design principals have been employed. In the vast majority of datacentres, the server rooms are kept exceedingly cold, but the servers sit there blowing out a heap of hot air back into the room. A huge amount of energy is thereby wasted constantly having to re-cool that hot air again, causing the cooling systems to work harder and consume more power than they ought to. Most datacentres use this traditional air conditioning technology which is effective but not eco-friendly.
HOST100’s datacentre use eco-friendly cooling, this is a completely natural way of producing cool air at exactly the right temperature, with a much smaller carbon footprint. Here's how it works:
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-The cooling system sucks in fresh air.
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-It filters it for dust and adds fine droplets of water.
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-As the water evaporates it cools the air.
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-This in turn cools the servers.
Our new units are the only evaporative coolers designed specifically to take European health and safety regulations into account. This makes us good for the environment. And keeps the Brussels bureaucrats happy and it turns out we're in good company, Facebook and Google have launched similar solutions in the US with great success.
A Final Thought!
It's important to stress therefore that the Internet is not a complete environmental disaster. However, there are far too many datacentres out there that are inefficient, and too many companies out there who are not giving nearly enough thought to ensuring the environmental impact of their infrastructure is kept to an absolute minimum. At the very least, by ensuing that your own web site is hosted on a great value, environmentally conscious hosting plan like ours, you can be assured that you have done everything possible to minimise the environmental impact of running your web site.
Click here to see the plans