Do you want to reduce your carbon dioxide footprint? Start now with greener web hosting. We’ve gathered what we think are the best green web hosting companies, and we hope you’ll be inspired to change.
Computer servers and web hosting systems are among the most significant contributors to global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. If we are genuinely concerned about greenhouse gases, we need to reduce and offset our emissions. Luckily, many bloggers and website owners have started paying attention and exploring options to reduce their carbon footprints.
There are various ways to counteract CO2 emissions related to hosting. The two most common are using clean electricity from green sources such as windmills and paying a hosting service a little extra money, which the hosting company uses to support greenhouse-gas reducing initiatives such as planting trees.
Below are six companies we think are doing an excellent job addressing this problem.
GreenGeeks
GreenGeeks has made a brand out of being one of the most environmentally friendly hosting providers on the web. They calculate how much energy they use and then work with the non-profit Bonneville Environmental Foundation and associated wind farms to produce three times as much wind energy as they consume. These efforts make GreenGeeks’ and their customers’ websites carbon negative.
What Makes GreenGeeks a Top Green Web Hosting Company?
We have chosen to include GreenGeeks on our list because of their efforts to offset CO2 emissions produced by their energy consumption. In addition, GreenGeeks is an experienced player in the hosting market and has been around since 2008.
Green Web Hosting Selling Point
GreenGeeks works with the Bonneville Environmental Foundation to produce three times more wind energy than they consume.
A2 Hosting
Another one of our favorites is A2 Hosting, specializing in WordPress hosting. A2 provides good service and an excellent price, quality, and security balance. They’ve been around since 2001, when Bryan Muthig founded the company in Ann Arbor, Michigan. They have data centers in Michigan and Arizona in the United States, Amsterdam in Europe, and Singapore in Asia. More than 100 employees look after the company’s thousands of customers.
What Makes A2 Hosting a Top Green Web Hosting Company?
A2 Hosting works for the environment in various ways and has been carbon neutral since 2007. The company collaborates with Carbonfund.org to completely offset the CO2 emissions from their servers. Carbonfund.org focuses on renewable energy projects, including wind farms and landfill gas-to-energy projects, and reforestation efforts.
Green Web Hosting Selling Point
A2 Hosting is carbon neutral and collaborates with Carbonfund.org, a fine initiative we admire. Keep on planting trees, A2 Hosting, and we will keep spreading the word!
iPage
iPage is another leader in green web hosting. The company was founded in 1998 by Tomas Gorny and is headquartered in Burlington. Today iPage is owned by the Endurance International Group, one of the most prominent players on the hosting scene. Endurance also owns market leaders such as HostGator and Bluehost. iPage is known for its good uptime, great prices, and excellent security. Read our iPage review here.
What Makes iPage a Top Green Web Hosting Company?
iPage is a worthy inclusion on our Top Green Web Hosting list for the same reason we included GreenGeeks: They offset their energy consumption. iPage buys windmill energy to compensate for its CO2 emissions and purchases twice the amount it uses.
Green Web Hosting Selling Point
iPage buys windmill energy certificates for twice as much energy as they consume.
DreamHost
Since 1997, DreamHost has provided hosting to blogs and websites worldwide. The company was founded by a group of undergraduate students in Claremont, California, and is now headquartered in Brea, California, with 200 employees. DreamHost offers shared hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated hosting from Apache and NGINX servers and has served more than 400,000 customers worldwide.
What Makes DreamHost a Top Green Web Hosting Company?
DreamHost is on our Top Green Web Hosting Companies list because their data centers are powered by grids obtaining electricity from renewable sources. Furthermore, DreamHost’s offices are LEED Platinum and EnergyStar certified.
Unlike Hosting Forest and GreenGeeks, which have a green web hosting part of their company DNA, DreamHost does not mention their clean energy use on their website’s top-level pages. If you look around, you will find “Green Hosting,” an explanation of DreamHost’s commitment to using clean power as well as other green initiatives. If you want a web hosting company that’s trying to minimize its CO2 footprint, DreamHost could be the green web hosting company for you.
Green Web Hosting Selling Point
DreamHost powers its data centers from grids that rely on sources of green energy. Furthermore, the company utilizes a high-efficiency cooling structure that uses reclaimed water to cool down the building.
HostPapa
Our last Top Green Web Hosting Company is HostPapa, one of the youngest companies on our list. Jamie Opalchuk founded HostPapa in 2007 with the dual goals of providing good service and green web hosting. HostPapa’s headquarters are in Burlington, Ontario, Canada, and they also operate from a handful of other locations where HostPapa serves the company’s 180,000 customers.
What Makes HostPapa a Green Web Hosting Company?
HostPapa was one of the first hosting companies to focus on going green. Like GreenGeeks and iPage, HostPapa buys clean energy certificates that compensate for their CO2 emissions. HostPapa lands at number six on our list because they are built on great green fundamentals but are smaller and compensate for their CO2 emissions to a lesser degree than GreenGeeks and iPage.
Green Web Hosting Selling Point: Despite being a relatively new company (2007), HostPapa was a pioneer in green web hosting, intending to be CO2 neutral. Even though other green web hosting companies have expanded their green ideas, HostPapa is still a green company. We thank HostPapa for being an early leader in green web hosting!
Why Green Hosting Matters
The internet is becoming a common necessity daily, which is the cause of the exponential growth of related resources. The data forms have evolved from plain texts to multiple formats of multimedia, including audio and video. This detailing and advancements on the internet have to increase loads on servers on which they are hosted, ultimately causing more data centers.
Data centers comprise many distributed in-level servers that operate and handle the content or websites like corporate websites or personal blogs. These servers in data centers require conditions like keeping them running in cooled, controlled environments. To maintain and fulfill these conditions and requirements, a large amount of energy is needed, producing a significant carbon dioxide gas as output. Of course, this is not an environment-friendly process.
Save Energy
As stated above, the web hosting providers require and use a lot of energy to operate servers and data centers in the cause of operating to provide services round the clock. In addition, things or setups like cooling controls and security system setups also consume a lot of energy. Green web hosting was introduced to tackle or prevent the negative influence of energy consumption on the environment.
The name shows that it is a web hosting solution mechanism that comprises power systems that utilize environment-friendly resources like renewable energy source generation.
What Is Green Web Hosting?
Green web hosting is an environmentally friendly approach to hosting websites. The green web hosting companies’ agenda or mission is to provide top-notch quality hosting services and do everything possible to keep their carbon footprint at a minimum. A usually standard methodology produces an equal amount or more incredible energy than what is being utilized and then returns that energy to the grid. Ways for a company to generate energy by a renewable power source like solar and wind-powered systems. These two methods are the most environmentally friendly methods of generating electricity.
If a company does not want to invest in having a solar or wind power generation system, it can take the services of a certified green energy supplier. Using a green energy provider’s services is a reasonable approach for web hosting companies to offset and introduce an environment-friendly influence on their energy consumption without the need for generating power themselves.
Get green hosting
Suppose a company does not want to invest in having a solar or wind power generation system or is not interested in generating electricity themselves. In that case, they can take the services of a certified green energy supplier for green energy consumption.
Where to buy green hosting?
If a company does not want to invest in having a solar or wind power generation system, it can take the services of a certified green energy supplier. The above stated are the best green hosting providing companies. They offer a variety of products and services with affordable price plans. You can go to their websites and explore more specific information about them.
Positive Impact on Your Company’s Reputation
You can improve your company’s public image by adding green credentials. Nowadays, companies who contribute enough to make simple changes to reduce their environmental impact are valued more. So this step can give a boost to your company’s reputation.
Marketing Impact
Going green is popular nowadays, so having green web hosting can be a marketing resource. You can publicize or advertise that your company invests in green web hosting services to contribute to the environment.
A company that can explain exactly how they are contributing to the betterment of the environment will have better chances of gaining potential clients’ trust, thus increasing business revenue. You can charge a little more to offer green services for those customers who are willing to pay a little extra for supporting eco-friendly web hosting with other environment-friendly businesses, which can contribute to increased profit margins.
Green Web Hosting Budgeting Benefit
Green web hosting and being an environment-friendly option provide affordability as when companies produce their energy through solar or wind-powered environment-friendly sources, they aren’t buying it. There is an initial starting cost for setting up the green energy source, but once it is placed and started, the hosting company starts saving money.
Therefore, green hosting does not have to cost more than usual hosting, resulting in decreased rates charged to the other companies who use these green hosting companies’ services. Hence for almost the same or cost, your company or business can gain customer trust with improved marketing for and by using eco-friendly web hosting along with keeping your business online and available round the clock.
Other Benefits of Green Web Hosting
The root benefit or the benefit structure’s backbone relies upon the fact that it lets you contribute to saving the environment and making eco-friendly operations viable. It does not matter what approach you are deploying, like reducing the carbon footprint or making power back into the grid. The thing to emphasize is that it positively impacts the environment, which matters in the end. Other vital benefits include energy efficiency, cost-saving, getting certification for contributing to the environment (helps in marketing and advertising for a good image and reputation), use of renewable energy sources for clean energy with no harm being done to the environment, use of protocols, shared hosting, and decreasing the E-Waste (can be a reduction in CO2 emission).
Green Web Hosting is an unusual or extraordinary move for the cause of saving the Earth and is a tremendous contribution to humans’ self-sufficiency in the future. It is an approach to get in line with the vision of various organizations contributing to making the world a better place to live for now and for future generations.
Why Use a Green Web Host?
This going green approach supports the hope that we will all consume less energy by neutralizing and balancing the energy deficits for energy consumption in other areas.
Providing eco-friendly services and being green with your web hosting can create a massive difference in reducing your website’s carbon footprint. You will know that you are giving back the equivalent energy of what you are utilizing by using a green hosting company. Suppose enough people understand this approach and mission and it becomes a common practice. In that case, the global carbon footprint of the internet can be reduced by a noticeable amount, thus contributing to problems like global warming and environmental pollution.
Conclusion
Nowadays, what people value greatly is the company’s contribution to saving the environment. Over the globe, a shift towards sustainable and renewable energy is seen, and the change has affected the workings of both businesses and consumers. Naturally, people want to have improved technological advancements, but not at the expense of damaging the environment.
So, green hosting is a very considerable act for implementation, provided the above-stated companies are offering hosting services according to it. Hence every business which requires this kind of service should opt for these environmentally friendly options to save the planet and contribute to a healthier and safer environment.
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