You have probably found this term several times recently right?

Green web hosting is not a particular type of hosting service, the difference is not in the service but in the approach some companies take and in their relationship with the environment. In fact you won’t notice any difference between the so called green web hosting or standard web hosting, there’s no difference between the two and there’s no way to tell if a web hosting company has gone green or not just examining its services.

So what’s it all about?

Data centers use an enormous amount of electric power throughout the year: server rooms must stay at the same temperature during day and night, summer and winter. Thousands of active servers in the same room produce an incredible amount of heat, to keep temperatures at recommended operating levels data center rooms must be air conditioned 24/7, 365 days per year. You know that power consumption of air conditioning systems is high, hence you can easily imagine how much energy is required to run air conditioning systems that are tens of times bigger than residential ones.

To this you must add the power consumed by thousands of servers and network equipment ( big routers or switching appliances use a lot of  electric energy, just to give you an idea some networking equipment can be as big as two washing machines, and use way more power than such two residential appliances ).

That said, it’s pretty obvious that the impact on the environment of a single data center is rather huge. Some companies (FatCow, HostGator and others ) have decided to switch to solar or wind power companies so, depending on their data center structure, switched to green energy companies or bought renewable energy credits from wind farms whose energy is then fed into the data center / telecommunications building electrical grid.

This represents a great effort from those companies to support our planet, so especially those customers particularly worried about the health of our planet often decide to thank them buying their hosting service from these providers rather than from another company.