Type “eco-friendly web hosting” into Google and you will get a plethora of sites claiming to be green and eco-friendly.    Primarily these companies do little in the arena of energy conservation and a lot in the arena of marketing.  The buzz words “green” and “eco-friendly” are big sellers these days, and just about everyone has jumped on the bandwagon.   

I did a little research on eco-friendly web hosting.  The easiest thing to do, and the preferred method for most of the companies in your Google search results, is to purchase carbon offsets.  This means they pay someone else to plant trees or use renewable energy sources instead of doing it themselves.   There’s nothing wrong with that approach, but to me it feels like cheating; plus, there’s no guarantee that the people they are paying to reduce their carbon emissions are actually doing so.   It is, however, better than doing nothing.  

Jelecos is more eco-friendly due to our advanced efforts in energy efficiency at our data center.  Our first step is maximizing server usage by implementing virtualization.   So, instead of having 10 servers each only using 5-10% of their capacity, using electricity and producing heat 24/7, we have one server running at 50-90% capacity, using the same amount of electricity and producing about the same amount of heat.    This allows us to have the same number of web sites running on fewer servers.  To date, we have replaced 20 less efficient servers with five!  Not only does this save us in electricity usage, it also means less energy spent on cooling.  

Ultimately, virtualizing reduces our space footprint and our overall Watt usage at the data center.  This reduces our power usage and in turn reduces the amount of cooling required by the data center.  But, we didn’t stop there.  We also made the cooling system more efficient.  Along with other changes, we implemented hot and cold aisles.  This means you keep the cold and hot air separated by enclosing the server cabinets and forcing the hot air into the ceiling (where it wants to go anyway) cooling it and returning it through the floor to cool the servers.   This simple change showed a 60% reduction on the air handlers at the data center.  We continue to monitor the energy usage by server rack to ensure we maximizing our energy usage.

Overall, a good eco-friendly web hosting company will track and actively reduce their actual energy consumption rather than just purchasing carbon offsets.  In reality, more energy is consumed by excess power on your personal computer.  We’ll examine that topic next!

This post is part of our Earth Day series.  Other posts in this series are:                           

                           Easiest Ways to Go Green at Work 
                           The Truth About Eco-Friendly Web Design
                           Three Computer Energy Savers