Choosing green web hosting is contributing to the global environment as web hosting is being one of the largest carbon-emitting sources.
The cost of electricity for air conditioning, data center, server and network equipment is about 8 billion USD worldwide and it has been growing very fast for every year since 2005 with the growth of Internet usage. It’s estimated if people don’t adopt any changes to this industry and make it more eco-friendly, web hosting will become the larger pollution source rather than the Airplane industry by the end of 2020.
With the increase in people being aware of this problem, green web hosting service came out.
So far, there has been many web hosting companies devoted into eco-friendly web hosting services, among which GreenGeeks, WebHostingHub and A2Hosting are the most popular choices. All of them are utilizing the most advanced technologies and methods to ensure green hosting services. And more outstanding features are presented as follows.
Best Green Web Hosting – GreenGeeks
GreenGeeks was founded in 2006 by Trey Gardener with two important goals: dependable web hosting services ($3.96/mo effectively) and green energy utilization. It claims to use 300% wind power and 100% carbon neutral. That is why it was awarded one of the best green web hosting providers over the past years. GreenGeeks adopts a wide range of approaches to be eco-friendly:
The main green methods adopted by GreenGeeks:
Reconfigure servers
Co-location data centers require 24×7×365 cooling system to ensure its operation, which means a large amount of energy will be used. GreenGeeks makes great efforts to refine and reconfigure its servers so that they can run more efficiently and use less electricity for cooling purpose.
Adopt eco-friendly working environment
GreenGeeks emphasizes reuse in offices where are equipped with recycling machines; thus, any documents that are printed by mistakes are returned to the recycle area for reuse. In order to conserve paper, only critical and necessary documents are printed. Besides, employees take home-cooked meals to offices to reduce the amount of plastic and Styrofoam which is related to takeout.
Purchase wind energy credits
Like every web hosting company, GreenGeeks pulls energy from the grid to ensure the constant and stable power flow. However, much of the power flows are produced by fossil fuel, which accelerates carbon emissions and amasses energy usages. In order to offset the immense energy consumption, GreenGeeks replaces 3 times the amount of energy used by its servers, which means if GreenGeeks pulled 1× of power from the grid, it would purchase 3×of power produced by wind and pull it back into the grid.
GreenGeeks provides various green web hosting solutions, among which the shared hosting plans are discounted 20% now for $3.96/mo only. The regular price starts at $4.95/mo, which is quite affordable.
The Green-Goer – WebHostingHub
WebHostingHub, one of the fast-growing web-hosting providers, provides reliable and impeccable web hosting services with a budget-friendly package to all the consumers ($1.95/mo). In order to reduce the harmful effect on the environment, lower waste, lessen energy consumption, and improve the carbon footprint in data centers, this web host carries out great efforts making its web hosting services green.
Here are the practices of WebHostingHub going GREEN:
Partnership with Tree for The Future
By joining an environmental organization, WebHostingHub greatly enhances the determination of going green. Over the last few years, WebHostingHub sponsored the planting of at least 5,000 trees, made a great contribution to the world environment.
Utilize advanced air cooling technology
Instead of running Computer Room Air Conditioners (CRACs), WebHostingHub chooses to utilize a greener technology—outside air cooling. The former one uses up numerous electricity to cool the hot air generated by all the machines while the latter one only needs to vent the hot air out of the buildings entirely and let cooler air into the rooms. This method significantly reduces energy consumption and carbon output.
Use energy-efficient data center
In fact, a large data center is an essential part for every web hosting provider to operate; thus the large electricity consumption is inevitable, and more than half of that energy use is depleted for cooling servers and air conditioning. This harsh reality prompts WebHostingHub to establish the first-ever Green Data Center. With this energy-efficient data center, WebHostingHub succeeds in cutting cooling costs by almost 70% and cuts back the carbon emission by more than 2,000 tons per year.
The Great Green Web Hosting – A2Hosting
A2Hosting, as an industry-acknowledged web host mainly, mainly provides shared hosting ($3.92/mo), VPS hosting and dedicated hosting, reseller hosting and WordPress hosting. Its top priority is to provide a dependable and fast web hosting service with the environmentally-friendly concept imbued in mind.
The main green methods are as follows:
Plant trees
Planting is a well-known efficient approach to absorb carbon and make oxygen. To make contributions to environmental protection, A2Hosting plants 1 tree for each purchase. It’s a part of the overall eco-strategy that A2Hosting makes to reduce its own energy consumption.
Offset carbon
A2Hosting works hard to compensate for the energy it consumes, such as building a paperless office environment, increasing recycling, and planting trees. Besides, instead of traditional dispatches, letters, or door-to-door services, A2Hosting makes use of paperless supporting including free calls, e-mails, and live chat helps customers become eco-friendly unconsciously.
Establish green data centers
A2Hosting believes that the best way to alleviate energy depletion is by reducing the usage rather than by offsetting the consumption. With a view to decrease energy consumption and carbon output, the company introduces the recurring cooling system for data centers. In this way, its green data centers only use Computer Room Air Conditioners when the outside temperature is high, or the weather is humid. This makes A2Hosting save a lot of energy consumption.
A2Hosting shared hosting starts from $7.99/mo regularly, while the promo link below brings a 51% discount for $3.92/mo.
Some Other Reasons as Why They Are the Best Green Hosting
To offer a reliable green hosting solution, only adopting a lot of green methods is not enough. Hosting quality is also important. In this case, all of our recommended web hosts are trustworthy enough to fully meet the below requirements.
Affordable Hosting Prices and Rich Features
Firstly, all of these web hosts need to be budget-friendly ones that do not charge you highly and include plenty of useful hosting features into each hosting plan. These include enough server resources, user-friendly control panel, free extras, security technologies, advanced programming languages and many more.
Even, they all offer the money-back guarantee to ensure the worry-free online deal. A2Hosting, in particular, allows the anytime refund policy.
Unlimited Features
It isn’t good enough to be the best web hosting if they only make use of clean energy. The three hosts also offer unlimited server resources, such as unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, and unlimited domain name allowed. Importantly, they charge a very reasonable and affordable price level.
In addition, they also come with advanced technologies like PHP, MySQL, Perl, Python, PostgreSQL, SSL, SSI, CGI, and more. Besides, they all utilize the most popular and convenient cPanel as the control panel, which gives users an easy interface to handle domains, emails, websites, disk space, bandwidth, databases, and so on so forth.
No Serious Downtime with the Low Frequency
This is an essential part of the evaluation of hosting quality. In this case, these recommended web hosts are all reliable options that ensure at least 99.9% uptime. Note that the hosting uptime is generally affected by the quality and specifications of their server machines and the facility of their data centers.
Fast Hosting Speed
In addition to reliability, the hosting speed is also important. As tested in the real world, all of the mentioned web hosts succeed in achieving the fast server response speed that is around 400 ms. In addition, to better improve the hosting performance, these web hosts also adopt some special technologies such as SSD drives and CloudFlare CDN.
Responsive Technical Support
The after-sales support service is the key aspect for all the web hosts. As researched and tested, these 3 web hosts all ensure the 24/7 technical support that can be asked via phone, email, ticket system and live chat. In addition, their support teams are all professional, consisting of a group of well-trained representatives.
