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Environmentally friendly web hosting

Monday, October 15, 2007

For those of you who have never seen a web server before, here's what a typical one looks like:

The unit shown above is referred to as a 2U web server. 2U stands for two (2) unit (U). A 1U server would be half the height of the above and is used as the basis for measuring the height of all other rack-mountable servers. Although the 2U server shown is typical in looks, 1U servers are probably far more common these days as they naturally take up less space and allow a hosting company to stack more machines into a confined space, thus increasing their potential to serve a greater number of customers.

Servers (whether specifically for web hosting or not) contain much the same components as a regular desktop computer - fans, hard disks, CD/DVD drives, processors - they also operate in much the same way. However as these machines need to be running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every single day of the year to serve an unknown number of users the world over, they are constantly running and therefore may have a couple of additional components to monitor the temperature and other aspects of the machine. Any computer that runs for more than 15 minutes at a time becomes hot and as these servers are typically stacked one on top of the other in data-centers, all the emitted heat combines to produce one very hot environment.

Given the size of the machines, some components need to be much smaller than what you would find in a typical desktop computer. Take for example the fan your computer no doubt has inside it to push air through to keep the internal temperature down (and prevent components from over-heating). It is probably around 5 to 6 inches in diameter. A 1U server is just 1.75 inches high, so as you can imagine a fan to go inside such a machine would need to be far smaller than your typical home computer. In fact, so small are the fans that go inside servers, one is never enough as it simply cannot push through enough air on its own, so it is not uncommon to find 6 or more of these tiny fans inside the chassis.

Six small fans all running at full speed to maximize the cooling affect inside a server is one very noisy affair, not to mention the extra power it consumes. For a reason such as this you might be considering what can be done to reduce the environmental impact servers such as these that host your web site have on our planet. Well, today more and more web hosting companies are facing up to the fact that running hundreds, if not thousands of these such servers is in part contributing to global warming. One company who has decided to do something about this is DreamHost. This web site (the one you are reading this article on) is hosted on DreamHost servers and so by association Folutions is helping to promote environmentally friendly web hosting (to prove it, click the image on the right).

DreamHost is being environmentally friendly in a carbon neutral way. They've calculated the impact of everything that they use and leave behind in the course of their daily work. All of the resources that they use - paper in the office, electricity for the servers, even the gas in their cars that get them to the office - create or contribute to some kind of environmental footprint.

With a bit of research they found the most effective approach naturally began with resource conservation in the office: turning off the lights, reducing travel, printing on both sides of the page. Efforts are continually being ramped up daily to do what they do with less. However, powering the web hosting servers in an environmentally friendly way is a little bit more tricky. Without the option to put up solar panels or connect with a green power utility means purchasing Renewable Energy Credits. To neutralize those unavoidable emissions they've also invested in Emission Reduction Credits (a.k.a. "offsets") which guarantee their remaining impact is effectively erased. A third-party-certification? Never fear. The credits they use to green their energy consumption and neutralize the rest of their emissions meet the highest standards in the industry. Click to view their up-to-date Certificate of Carbon Neutralization.

Web hosting is one of the biggest industries in the world, yet so few providers are doing it in an environmentally friendly way. Why? Well, it's more than likely just down to profits. DreamHost have bitten the bullet and gone for it though and so to show your support (and optionally display a nifty Green logo like above), why not sign up with them for your web hosting today? Using their promotion code NEUTRAL*, you can get your first year of hosting on their monthly plan for a total of just $30 (yes, for the year, though there is a setup fee - prepaid yearly packages have no setup fee though, see below). And just because they are now environmentally friendly, doesn't mean they are skimping on the features either. Visit them right now and you will be amazed at what they have to offer.

* The promo code NEUTRAL can be applied to any of their packages for great savings: Prepaid 1 year just $50, prepaid 2 year $145. Save over $70 on each of their prepaid 3, 5 and 10 year packages too.