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October 15th, 2007. A date marked by the unison of voices talking about environmental issues: the Blog Action Day.

Environment is in everyone’s mind this days. Global Warming, Greenhouse gases, Polar Caps melting are just examples of expressions we are used to hear and read about… and that’s good. It’s about time that people realize that Environment Issues is not something that only others should be concerned about.

But are we doing everything we can? Maybe we have changed our personal and household habits to more green ways, but what about other services we use, how green are they?

For webmasters, a topic of interest is, of course, web hosting. Different plans, budgets, reliability… It’s easy to get overwhelmed with all those numbers and forget about the environment. After all, bought hosting is almost a virtual thing: you pay for it, you can setup your website and everything is done on the internet limbo. But what is behind the power of those server farms?

Reliability

Nowadays, any host that does not guarantee at least 99.9% of uptime is not an option (less than 9 hours down per year). Some go even further and promise less downtimes. To guarantee this numbers, hosts empower a multitude of backup processes not only of the servers themselves but also of energy sources, just in case the main power supply goes down. These energy sums up to extremely high power bills for the hosts. Even more, due to the competitiveness between hosts, the prices are getting lower and lower and up times higher and higher. The only option that many hosts have to stay in business is reducing costs as much as possible, even if it means getting the cheapest electricity, usually coming from dirty energy sources (oil, coal and nuclear).

Now, there are sites that do need that kind of reliability. An hour down might mean lots of money lost. But for the average site, is it so important if it goes down a few minutes once in a while? Does it really mean so much loss? Probably not.

Alternatives

So what can webmasters do to minimize their carbon footprint?

The easiest way is to choose hosts that rely solely on renewable energies, like the sun and wind, to maintain the servers. Nonetheless there are downsides to this. The first one is, as I mentioned above, reliability. It’s possible that instead of 99.9% these hosts can only guarantee 99.8% or 99.7%. Again it’s a balance. Does it really matter that some sites go down for a few more hours a year? The other is the price. In order to guarantee a high reliability only on sun or wind power, usually these hosts charge a bit more than “dirty” hosts. But if your site does indeed need a 99.9% up time, chances are that it is generating more than enough revenue to afford the higher prices.

This site

It’s not perfection, but there is a third option. There are many hosts out there that cannot rely only on renewable energies but do something to minimize the carbon offset by acquiring carbon credits. Meaning, they partner with third parties that are responsible for developing green areas and renewable energy technologies in a way that the carbon emissions needed to power these hosts are netted to zero (more trees equals less carbon overall). The problem is that usually the investments are not done on the host geographical area, but at least overall the negative impact is not increased. This site, and in fact all the blogs hosted by the Digital-Folders Network, are hosted on a Carbon Neutral Hosting company. If for nothing else, it makes me sleep a little better knowing that something that I love doing is not damaging the environment even more.

Conclusion

Although it may seem little, if all the sites turned to green hosts, the impact could be significant. It’s not much, but next time you need to look for a host, go for green.

Still relating with the Blog Action Day, all the revenue generated by this site during this day will be forwarded to an Environmental Organization.