Friday, February 6, 2009

Comparing the Top 3 Green Web Hosting Companies


Many people are striving to be green these days by driving less, turning off lights after leaving a room or replacing old light bulbs with modern CFLs, but it's easy not to realize just how far our environmental impact goes. It was recently "revealed" in an article by the UK's Sunday Times that every Google search generates approximately 7 grams of CO2. The next day a TechChrunch post challenged the figure stating that the source for the Times' numbers, a young physicist named Alex Wissner-Gross, made no such claim. Regardless of whether or not a Google search actually releases 7 grams of CO2 or not, it's tough to argue the fact that our online activities have real environmental consequences.

According to Dreamhost, a popular online web hosting company, their operations generated as much CO2 as 545 average homes! With much of EcoMail's business centered around our online presence from our web site and blog to regular Twitter usage, I decided to do some research into greener alternatives for our web hosting company.

The first thing anybody with a website should do when considering a switch is back up EVERYTHING. This can be accomplished fairly painlessly with a common FTP program like FileZilla for Windows or Cyberduck for Mac OS X. Simply download all your files from your webserver to you computer. Consider backing up to CD/DVD or an external hard drive for added redundancy.

The List:

I started out by comparing the following 9 popular web hosts many from this Lifehacker article , one as recommended by @philmcdonnell and the hosting company I currently use:








The Tests:

The most important factor for this article was carbon neutrality but price and overall experience including customer support, uptime and server speed are also important. Therefore, each company gets a score from 1-10 for each of the three criteria.

The Top Three:

Dream Host (www.Dreamhost.com)

Carbon neutrality: 8/10 - They have a nice page outlining their practices which include reducing waste, recylcing and purchasing carbon credits. They also include a set of really nice graphics to display on your home page indicating that you're using green hosting like this one:



Price: 7/10 - $5.95 per month for unlimited hosting only if you pay 10 years up front $714.00. Otherwise, prices start at around $11/month + a $50 setup fee. There are however discount codes available like "MAXLOVE" which will save you $97. Definitely not the cheapest host but not unreasonable.

Experience: 5/10 - I have not personally used Dreamhost but I've read numerous reports of downtime and slow speeds.

Think Host (www.Thinkhost.com)

Carbon neutrality: 9/10 in addition to purchasing carbon/energy credits, Think Host has a social mission. They run a tree planting program and every new customer gets a tree planted in their name. You can read more here

Price: 6/10 Think Host doesn't offer a monthly plan and prices start at $7.95 per month for two years paid up front for unlimtied hosting. The shortest commitment is 6 months which carries a $20 per month price.

Experience: 5/10 Reports of slow loading times and connection drops abound across the 'net. They do have a 24/7 help line though which is a definite benefit.

1&1 Hosting (www.1and1.com)

Carbon neutrality: 7/10 Currently only their European data centers use alternative energy but they plan to introduce the same policy here in the US next year.

Price: 9/10 Price is one of the best draws of 1&1. Their monthly plans start at $4 per month for 10GB of storage and 300GB of transfer per month and the more expensive business-oriented plans offer a 3 month free period.

Experience: 9/10 I've had a very positive experience with 1&1 with support, speed and uptime. There are many positive reviews for them out there too.

Closing Remarks:

For an overall experience, I would recommend 1&1 although they may not be the most green of the bunch, they are certainly the best value. I was surprised to find that so many other web hosting companies don't even offer the option of green hosting. GoDaddy in particular is a popular choice for many first-time web builders but I would strongly recommend that everybody stay away from them due to random extra "services" carrying hefty fees, terrible support and of course no green initiative.

Note: After this post was published, I received an email from Dr. Wissner-Gross of CO2Stats.com who wished to comment that "in addition to hosting, websites also have network and client-side [carbon] footprints." This is an accurate and important observation and following Dr. Wissner-Gross' advice, EcoMail has signed up with his company, CO2Stats to provide us with our online carbon offsets at a very reasonable monthly fee of $4.95. Be sure to check out the new CO2Stats seal on EcoMailMarketing.com!

Please leave your comments either below or @ecomail. Thanks for reading!


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I would check out an even greener hosting company, www.aiso.net

India web hosting said...

This is a good read for me, Must accept that you are just one of the best blogger I ever noticed. Thanks for publishing this great article.
web hosting company

 
Clicky Web Analytics