While everyone is discussing how to keep the Earth green and offering up solutions for how we can reduce our human impact, I thought I would jump in and see what I could do. I’ve already gone a bit David Cameron and started cycling to as many places as I can get to without having a heart attack, which as time goes on gets further and further. Soon I’ll be starting a pointless yet energetic daily 12 hour commute from Lyme Regis to London.

Big business gets away with selling us materials which don’t degrade or aren’t friendly to the environment, and at the same time we are told to recycle all we can. This got me thinking, small business have their share of pollution,if I’m in a position to do something, however trivial, it could become a great benefit to my business and the environment. Everybody wins. I’ve been thinking about what I could do to reduce or erase my business’ carbon footprint.

Hosting Companies.

There is a variety of terminology to confuse you when it comes to green web hosts. There are two main areas as far as I have found, carbon neutral and carbon free.

Carbon Neutral.

These companies still use the same old energy source they always have, namely electricity created by burning fossil fuels. But, and here’s where the little lies come sneaking in, they buy ‘credits’ or get out of jail free cards. Making their energy supplies green, yep, because they buy credits to offset their carbon usage. When you think about it they are just buying their way out of the situation. It doesn’t do anything to help reduce the amount of fossil fuels burnt and the resulting carbon footprint.

Examples

Carbon Free.

This truly is the way forward, this is what I think of when people talk about the future of energy; taking the energy from a sustainable source, lets say the sun, and using, say solar panels, to convert this energy into a form which can be used easily, then use the resulting energy to power the things we need. In this case it’s servers. This eliminates the need for fossil fuels. This is where we will host the websites of the future, and most probably do everything else that’s important, like power my toothbrush.

Examples

So how much carbon do I save by hosting my web sites on a truly green server?