When is a Green Web Host Really Green?
It is not easy being green, but the fast rising trend in the hosting world is to claim that you are a “green” web host.
That means that you are environmentally friendly and you fall under what is a scam in my opinion with the whole carbon offset project. Bob writes in with this related question…
“I have seen several web hosting companies claim they are ‘carbon neutral’ and ‘green web hosts’. Is this a marketing ploy or something I should be happy to see?”
To be honest there are a lot of people still “on the fence” with how good or not so good being “carbon neutral” is. On the positive side of things, before being taken over by the nutty people the idea of being carbon neutral was a good idea. It means you are releasing no carbon into the atmosphere. One of the first places that claimed to be totally carbon neutral was Vatican City, so you know if the Pope does it, it can’t be all that bad.
Then came in these special interests and people looking to make a buck on the deal. Web hosts go to a firm and buy a number of carbon credits to equal the amount of waste they are putting out. If they buy enough to cover their rear ends then they can claim to be carbon neutral. Think off it as a fat person who wants to get skinny, but instead of eating right and doing exercise they by “skinny credits” from Richard Simmons and they can claim to be skinny and health even though they haven’t changed a thing.
If your really interested in seeing how green your web host really is, try asking them what they are actually doing that could be seen as being economically friendly rather than how many carbon credits have they purchased.
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True!
Ive seen this recently hosting companies trying this straregy.Does it work for them i think it does as there are some real daft folks who will think that its all true and they will purchace some hosting.
ITs like selling london fog,in a empty tin can and when you open the tin its empty.but daft folks will buy the empty tins as they belive that the label cant lie!!
We do it, and if it’s a scam, then so is my electric company regulated and overseen by the government.
At my home, I have the option to pay a premium for renewable energy, and I have lots of official stuff on my bill showing the higher price I pay with the guarantees that money got fed into the grid. My electric company releases the energy I pay for into the grid - they have to, or its illegal. Are the zaps coming into my house guaranteed to be clean?
No. Energy delivery is communal - but the higher premium I pay puts more clean energy into the grid that would not otherwise get there. If enough people chose to pay for the higher premium, a higher percentage of energy in the grid would be renewable. Does it come with the same ego boost as solar panels on the top of my house? No. Does it ensure that less pollution comes from me because I pay more than everyone else? Yes. It makes a difference.
It’s the same concept. Green Tags enable people that want to buy renewable energy but who don’t have it directly available to them to do so. If *everyone* did it no matter where they were, we could all be green in a short amount of time.
If you wonder if its a scam, ask to see the certificates that were issued (as we all get certificates saying precisely what we bought), and the report as to how they arrived at how much to offset. If they can’t give it to you, then yes, possibly, it’s a scam.
If they *can*, the place you are hosting is paying for their energy *twice*, once to keep the power on, and again in the same amount to feed that energy they used back into the grid as green energy so someone else doesn’t have to use dirty energy.
How someone voluntarily choosing to pay for their electricity twice can be considered “a scam” is beyond me.
[...] 07 Best Explanation of Carbon Credits/Carbon Neutral By DaveAdd commentsGeneral Tomfoolery From The Web Hosting Show: Web hosts go to a firm and buy a number of carbon credits to equal the amount of waste they are [...]
Hi Jen, I respect your thoughts on this and thanks for your feedback. The main problem with carbon credits though is that these big companies are just trading these credit around covering each other’s rear ends. When it comes to being environmentally friendly I think there are better and faster ways to see results rather than to have another level of governmental mess that doesn’t make sense to anybody.
@Mitch - you are probably right, there are, but you do what you can and people shouldn’t be attacked or branded scam artists for doing something, but not enough.
I’m a small host, 5 servers, and I *did* look at AISO and contacted greenwebhosting before they launched - what I found was their offerings for small hosts that want to be in a fabulous data center are simply not enough. It’s not configurable enough or competitive enough. When I asked about different boxes, it was one size fits all - that’s not what I need.
My “corporate office” has a recycled door as a desk, and my chair was freecycled. My office phone rings on my main line through a service to save energy - I didn’t buy carbon offsites so I could slap a “dude, I’m green, buy here” as some new marketing scam. I did it because moving to a solar powered data center would not get me the quality I needed and that my clients were used to. And I tried.
Green Tags are the best way that I could do it, and I pay a heck of a lot of money, kilowatt per kilowatt +10% in case I’m off, to do it. The fact that someone may assume I’m pulling some scam is really upsetting - the fact that the industry is potentially perpetuating the idea that it’s a scam is alarming. I don’t sit here and pray that no one does it so I can corner some mythical market - I hope every single solitary hosting company will someday be able to say they are carbon neutral. Our industry is miserably inefficient and that has to change in any and every way we can change it.
But those who market green and buy offsets are doing *something* - how much they are doing beyond that is up to the buyer to discover and find out, but it has to be better than a company that’s not doing anything at all when making a choice where to host.
I don’t think the “Green” hosts are trying to do wrong but there are a lot of misconceptions and that I know for sure and the host should do their best job to explain their “Green” policy to their customers so they know what they are really doing.
[...] for the most part, I enjoy it and think Mitch has done a pretty good job. I then see a post titled When is a Green Web Host Really Green? and this phrase: That means that you are environmentally friendly and you fall under what is a scam [...]