Green and Carbon Neutral web hosting providers

Blue Host

David Herron — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 04:20:59 +0000

Blue Host offers an inexpensive shared hosting service with an extensive set of of features. Their offering goes well beyond the typical shared hosting features, but for a very low price.

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Host Papa

David Herron — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:03:11 +0000

Very low scale hosting provider offering only shared hosting. They claim to be "green" by dint of having had an audit of their energy use, and by buying "green tags" to make up for that energy use.

hostpapa.com/

MySQL 5.0 Databases (100)

PHP 5.0 enabled (note: not 5.2.x??)

Web Builder Software (SohoLaunch)

Unlimited Disk Space

Video tutorials

Reviews

http://hostjury.com/reviews/Hostpapa -- Highly positive

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WebHostingBuzz

David Herron — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:09:04 +0000

They are carbon neutral by having a partnership with the International Tree Foundation where ITF does tree plantings and they are able to claim carbon credits. Their announcement doesn't make it clear whether the agreement offsets all carbon footprint, or just part of it. Regardless of how much offset they're buying, they are doing more than the ones who don't even think about this issue.

Reviews:

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Sustainable Websites

David Herron — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:15:43 +0000

They are Carbon Neutral through purchasing "green tags" (Renewable energy certificates or RECs) from the Mountain View Wind facility in San Gorgonio Pass, California.

Banner:

http://www.sustainablewebsites.com/

Think Host

David Herron — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:30:42 +0000

They are 'green' through having conducted an audit of all their hosting facilities and purchasing green energy tags to match their energy use. They also have a commitment to social responsibility, social change, use of telecommuting, use of open source software, etc. They offer free web hosting to US based, registered non-profit progressive organizations whose primary focus is environment, grass roots democracy, peace, social/economic justice or human rights.

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Go Green Hosting

David Herron — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:35:33 +0000

They proudly put 'green' everywhere on their site, so that you know they do 'green hosting'. They're green through purchasing renewable energy certificates.

Banner:

http://www.gogreenhosting.com/

Greenest Host

David Herron — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:41:10 +0000

I suppose by being 'greenest host' they are the most green of web hosting operations? Well, rather than rely on green power credits their hosting facilities are in a solar powered data center just north of San Diego. As they say, rather than create the dirty power in the first place and do something else to offset the dirty power, they simply use green power.

http://www.greenesthost.com/

Affordable Internet Services Online (AISO)

David Herron — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:47:29 +0000

AISO is a solar powered web hosting provider who runs their own data center, and runs their own solar power array to power that data center.

http://www.aiso.net/

Solar Energy Host

David Herron — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:54:23 +0000

Unlike many 'green' web hosting providers, Solar Energy Host is located in the "only" solar powered data center in the U.S.

http://www.solarenergyhost.com/

NEXCESS.NET

David Herron — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:01:13 +0000

NEXCESS.NET is 'green' through purchasing green power certificates, however they have a stated goal of being 100% renewable energy powered by December 2009, and that today they are 25% renewable energy powered.

http://www.nexcess.net/company/green-web-hosting.php

Their service names are: Nexcess, for shared hosting, MaxVPS for virtual private servers, and EliteRAX for dedicated hosting.

The services provided are very comprehensive. The shared hosting accounts even include "Java Compiler" and "Tomcat" support meaning one could run servlets on shared hosting.

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Sustainable Hosting

David Herron — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:08:29 +0000

They are 'green' through purchasing renewable energy credits (green-e certified).

Banner:

http://www.sustainablehosting.com/

Green Man Web Hosting

David Herron — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:17:06 +0000

They are a fully solar powered web hosting provider.

http://www.greenmanwebhosting.com/

Solar Web Host

David Herron — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:22:14 +0000

They are 'green' through using a fully solar powered data center.

http://www.solarwebhost.net/

Think Green Hosting

David Herron — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:24:11 +0000

They are green through purchasing renewable energy credits.

Banner:

http://www.thinkgreenhosting.net/

Acorn Host

David Herron — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:28:32 +0000

They are carbon neutral through purchasing renewable energy certificates.

http://www.acornhost.com/

Solar VPS

David Herron — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:35:18 +0000

They offer virtual private server web hosting, with an ecologically sensitive approach. The name of the service includes 'Solar' which would lead you to think it's a solar powered business. But this appears to not be the case. They have chosen components and other business practices which have low power requirements. They support green causes. But they aren't either buying carbon credits, renewable power credits, or directly using renewable energy.

Banner:

http://www.solarvps.com/

Pair Networks

David Herron — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 08:39:43 +0000

Pair Networks was one of the earliest of the web hosting providers, and have remained independent for nearly 15 years. They provide an exhaustive array of web hosting plans, and they are a domain registrar (PAIRNIC).

They are Carbon Neutral (Pair Networks Environmental Policy) through buying carbon credits using the TerraPass plan. Plus they have some energy saving policies etc.

Digital Pacific (Australia)

David Herron — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 14:46:27 +0000

http://www.digitalpacific.com.au/ - A full service web hosting provider in Australia offering a comprehensive range of web hosting plans.

Their VPS service uses the Parallels Virtuozzo technology that allows dynamic resizing of a VPS.

http://www.digitalpacific.com.au/green-hosting/ - They claim carbon neutral status through purchasing carbon credits and implementing a recycling program and a work from home program.

Dreamhost

David Herron — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 14:59:25 +0000

dreamhost.com - Is an almost full service web hosting provider. Their core competency is shared hosting but they do offer a dedicated hosting arrangement, but prevent you from having root access to your "dedicated" server.

They offer what they call a "private server" which offers some dedicated resources but is not quite a VPS.

I use Dreamhost for this site (and a couple others) plus because they offer tremendous data storage limits, my Dreamhost account serves as an offsite backup of my personal files.

A2 Hosting

David Herron — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:14:26 +0000

A2 Hosting, Inc. - They offer a comprehensive set of hosting features.

The VPS technology is based on OpenVZ and includes a control panel available to the customer.

Carbon Neutral Web Hosting - They are 'carbon neutral' by virtue of buying carbon credits and partnering with The Carbon Fund - carbonfund.org.

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Ecological Hosting

David Herron — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:21:53 +0000

http://www.ecologicalhosting.com/ -- Offers a decent array of hosting plans.

http://www.ecologicalhosting.com/hosting -- Their data center is completely powered directly by solar energy. The data center is in southern California and is, I believe, hosting some of the other green web hosting providers.

Planet Mind

David Herron — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:27:32 +0000

http://planetmind.net/ -- Is a web hosting provider offering a set of shared hosting packages.

Their front page proclaims the servers are fully powered by solar panels and wind generators on site with their data center.

Solar Host

David Herron — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:31:29 +0000

http://www.solarhost.co.uk/ -- Is a web hosting provider offering a small set of shared hosting plans.

Their servers are 100% solar powered.

Ecosky

David Herron — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 19:49:51 +0000

"ecoSky is a provider of leading internet services powered by clean, renewable, solar and wind energy. We host web sites using an infrastructure that draws power from the sun and wind." Their offerings are three levels of shared hosting plans, and a dedicated hosting plan.

Sustainable Hosting

David Herron — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 06:09:52 +0000

A web hosting provider offering a fairly comprehensive set of features in shared hosting plans. Their servers run Linux, offer PHP with Zend optimization, and a useful set of available features.

They also offer managed dedicated servers.

Their claim to being 'carbon neutral' is through purchasing Green-E Certified power. They show the certificate on their site, and they buy credits equal to 40,000 kwh of power per year. They also note that until we have properly recyclable computers there will be no such thing as truly sustainable web hosting.

Banner:

http://www.sustainablehosting.com/

Ecohosting

David Herron — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 19:21:38 +0000

http://ecohosting.com/ is a website hosting company. Their hosting plans are typical no frills shared hosting.

They claim to be "ecological" and "sustainable" without having a page explaining that further. In the foot of the main page is a link to http://www.pembina.org/wind/ .. which is some sort of organization advocating for clean power, and their purchase agreements for wind power.

GAIA Host Collective

David Herron — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 18:09:35 +0000

A socially and environmentally concerned, worker-owned collective providing reliable internet hosting services including domain registration, shared server hosting on Open Source and Windows platforms, and dedicated server hosting.

Their social mission includes 100% worker owners, collective management, donating profits to nonprofits, etc.

The environmental mission includes buying power from green power providers, using recycled paper, etc.

Banner:

http://gaiahost.coop/

Host Gator

David Herron — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 23:44:27 +0000

They offer a comprehensive set of web hosting features at reasonable prices. Their FREE Site Builder will allow you to easily create a professional looking website within minutes! And they offer a large number of prebuilt site templates you can use. Each hosting account comes with cPanel to manage the account, and using the Fantastico system you can install any of 55 different web applications with a couple clicks of the mouse.

Banner:

http://www.hostgator.com/green-web-hosting.shtml

Silver Rack

David Herron — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 23:52:42 +0000

They specialize in providing high performance and affordable Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting. They offer a variety of VPS hosting plans to fit any budget or application. Their VPS hosting plans are perfect for hosting Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP, and Java applications. A VPS allows you great flexibility in installing anything you damn well please to have running on your server.

Their plans are reasonably priced. However it appears likely they won't be doing much handholding.

Banner:

http://www.silverrack.com/

Good Avacado

David Herron — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:02:15 +0000

They offer a complete set of web hosting features while not explicitly saying what those features are. There is said to be no limits to the number of websites hosted, disk usage, bandwidth etc.

They only offer shared hosting services.

An interesting feature is their "cloud network". This seems to mean automatic scaling based on traffic load.

They achieve carbon neutral status through purchasing energy credits and tree planting initiatives.

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Super Green Hosting

David Herron — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:08:44 +0000

They offer shared hosting accounts with a comprehensive set of features. Unlimited disk space, unlimited data transfer, unlimited number of domains, etc.

They claim to be 100% carbon neutral. They use efficient servers which decrease energy requirements. They participate in tree planting campaigns. They assist their customers in buying renewable energy credits.

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Gray Matter Green Web Hosting

David Herron — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:19:50 +0000

They offer a reasonable set of shared hosting services. This includes PHP support and the ability to install PHP or Perl based web applications. However the disk space allotments are very limited.

Their facility is 100% solar powered.

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http://www.graymatterhost.com/

Proper Web Hosting

David Herron — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:32:43 +0000

They offer a fairly comprehensive set of shared hosting features. However the technology is last generation such as PHP 4.2.x when PHP 5.x is the current release. Also the disk and bandwidth allotments are skimpy.

They purchase renewable energy credits to become green.

Banner:

http://www.properhosting.com/

Lush Technologies

David Herron — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 01:36:29 +0000

They offer a comprehensive set of shared hosting plans with good features. The plans include access to a wide range of web applications etc. Their service price looks expensive but there may be a good reason for that.

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http://lushtech.com/

Elfon Green Web Hosting

David Herron — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 01:46:23 +0000

They offer comprehensive shared web hosting in a very affordable package.

They purchase green tags certified by Green-e, the nation's leading independent green power certification and verifications programs for renewable energy. They utilize other initiatives to reduce other environmental impacts.

Banner:

http://www.elfon.com/

Green Geeks

David Herron — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 01:55:37 +0000

They offer a reasonably priced comprehensive shared hosting plan. This includes unlimited pretty much everything like disk space, bandwidth, etc.

They buy "green tags", a form of renewable energy certificates, from a wind energy provider.

Banner:

http://www.greengeeks.com/

xmission

David Herron — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 02:05:59 +0000

Offers a comprehensive range of shared hosting, and colocation plans. Xmission has been in the web hosting business since 1993. It appears their service offers essentially everything you could want.

They purchase renewable power through Rocky Mountain Power's Blue Sky program.

Banner:

http://www.xmission.com/

iMountain

David Herron — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 03:03:10 +0000

They offer a seriously interesting range of hosting packages all of which rely on some kind of cluster technology. Rather than have a single web server assigned to your site, this cluster approach lets traffic bursts be spread across multiple servers. Additionally they offer cache technology such as memcache to help relieve traffic load for web technology that can utilize memcache. The hosting features are comprehensive.

They operate their own data center with their own solar power plant to power the data center.

Banner:

http://www.imountain.com/

noco hosting

David Herron — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 03:09:23 +0000

They offer a set of comprehensive shared hosting plans. The feature set provided is fairly complete and useful for shared hosting of web applications. However the usage limits are fairly tight. They do explain that "most of you don't need 400gb of disk space" which may be true but at the same time their largest hosting plan only offers 5gb of disk space and 10 gb of bandwidth. That isn't much especially in todays era of large multimedia files. A podcast for example could easily outstrip those limits, and this is their largest plan?

Banner:

http://www.nocohosting.com/

Taproot Hosting

David Herron — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 03:15:25 +0000

They offer comprehensive shared hosting plans. They also offer hands on assistance with web design and other webmaster services. Finally the pricing is reasonable.

They claim to be green, and back up this claim with purchases of renewable energy credits from companies that produce wind power.

Banner:

http://taproothosting.com/

Ultra Hosting

David Herron — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:12:58 +0000

Ultra Hosting provides various levels of virtual servers, dedicated servers and server colocation. They do not provide shared web hosting. They claim to offer high reliability starting with a large staff of technicians, good management processes, continuous improvement, etc.

They offer management services in which their staff takes some of the load of managing the server. This includes monitoring, rebooting as necessary, security hardening, software install, etc. All this depends on the level of service you buy.

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Avacado Toast

David Herron — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 17:45:04 +0000

A web hosting provider... They offer a pretty darn extensive list of domain registration features such as being able to facilitate domain registration in any of these top level domains: ".com .net .info .org .mobi .biz .us .asia .in .ws .at .be .cc .cn .de .fm .gs .jobs .jp .ms .nu .nz .tc .tw .uk .vg .tv .ca".

They offer several forms of shared hosting plans. The feature set is comprehensive and they have a system of easy install for a wide variety of web applications.

They offer hosting of Microsoft Outlook email services.

Banner:

http://www.avocadotoast.com/

Online 4 earth

David Herron — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 21:08:24 +0000

They're a web hosting provider but it's really hard to figure that out. Their front page has a discussion of making the world a better place and the search for ideal solutions etc, but it's hard to get at what they're talking about.

They have a page listing types of green web hosting. They say "100% carbon neutral". But I'm not sure it's a good idea to work with them unless they make it clear what they're doing.

Banner:

http://www.online4earth.com/

Glow Host

David Herron — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 21:34:48 +0000

A web hosting provider with a comprehensive range of plans (from shared hosting to dedicated servers) and is also carbon neutral.

On shared hosting they make a clear distinction of how many customers are hosted per server for every. Most hosting providers don't do this, so it's a refreshing bit of transparency. Their "semi-dedicated plan" likewise has a clearly specified number of customers per server.

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Bounce Web

David Herron — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 04:03:57 +0000

A web hosting provider offering a pretty comprehensive shared hosting plan at a good price. They offer unlimited data storage, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited domains, hmmm, it always gives me a pause to wonder whether they can actually provide all that 'unlimited'.

They allow ffmpeg, meaning you can do video conversions on the server and do video hosting.

Banner:

http://www.bounceweb.com/

Pandela

David Herron — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 05:32:32 +0000

They are a web hosting company that specializes in virtual private servers. This means you would receive what looks like an entire server dedicated to your use, but it is really a slice of an existing server. This allows the hosting company to still implant multiple accounts per physical server while giving you full control over your hosting service.

They offer both Windows and Linux based virtual private servers.

Banner:

http://www.pandela.com/

Yellow Dandelions

David Herron — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 18:37:17 +0000

They are a web hosting company offering a series of shared hosting plans. Their hosting plans are fairly priced and have a decent feature set.

You can host web applications written in PHP, Perl, Python or Ruby on Rails. They offer some of the usual geeky utilities like curl, imagemagick, phpMyAdmin, etc.

Banner:

http://www.yellowdandelions.com/

Host a Tree

David Herron — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 19:49:32 +0000

They are a green web hosting provider who offers a good set of features at good prices. They offer both shared hosting and dedicated servers.

On shared hosting they offer .. instant setup of various web applications like blogging platforms .. email services including mailing lists ..

On dedicated hosting they offer, well, machines. For an extra cost you can hire them to manage the server. An interesting thing is the bandwidth is unmetered, but your machine is on a bandwidth-limited circuit.

Banner:

http://hostatree.com/

Lightbeing Creations

David Herron — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 18:27:41 +0000

Lightbeing Creations is a web hosting provider and web design shop based in the UK.

They offer shared hosting plans on Linux and Windows servers, as well as dedicated servers.

The shared hosting plan offers the essential features that allows installing typical PHP web applications like Wordpress or Drupal.

Banner:

http://www.lightbeingcreations.co.uk/

Tree Centric

David Herron — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 19:23:55 +0000

TreeCentric is a 'green web hosting provider' that offers shared and dedicated hosting plans.

The shared hosting plan is fairly comprehensive. The pricing is reasonable. The featureset is sufficient for hosting typical PHP based web applications such as blogging or wiki engines.

Their dedicated servers are configured similarly to the shared servers with the same sort of software etc. You do not get root access to the server raising the question of what's the point to getting a dedicated server without root access?

Banner:

http://www.treecentric.com/

Host Virtual

David Herron — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:22:05 +0000

They are a web hosting provider who seems to specialize in virtual private servers (VPS), in that VPS's are the only plans they offer. The plans are reasonably priced and have high memory and bandwidth allotments. With extra charges you can increase those allotments as far as desired.

Their network connectivity goes directly to the major Internet backbone providers.

They offer what appears to be excellent management facilities. You can easily create new server images, add or delete servers, do operating system installs, set up domain name services (DNS) and more.

Banner:

http://www.hostvirtual.com/