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Hosting for tree huggers
Webhosting venture AISO Inc is hoping that putting on a green face will help it gain some new customers.
The California company claims to have build a "green" design to its web hosting facility that will minimize the impact on the earth's resources. The building is powered by 120 solar panels as well as other environmental friendly design features.
It's no secret that hosting firms are big energy hogs, so naturally there are firms trying to make money off that. AISO is joined by several other 'green' hosting providers that power their data centres from renewable energy sources.
It probably makes good business sense. Hosting services are pretty much a commodity service where providers find it impossible to differentiate their products from the competition. Being green is a clear differentiator that could give profit margins a nice boost.
Spanish
Hi, thanks for this post - I just wanted to make mention of our company if I could; ThinkHost, Inc. We're also a green web hosting provider:
http://www.thinkhost.com/socialchange/renewable-energy-hosting.shtml
Globally, there's an awful lot of data center infrastructure already in place and while it would be nice to have solar panels and wind turbines directly powering each one of them, it's horribly expensive at this point, somewhat wasteful of current infrastructure and is going to be some time coming.
The purchase of green tags is a great way for web hosts to do something environmentally positive right now by ensuring the equivalent power that they use is fed into a grid somewhere from renewable sources such as solar and wind. It's a big picture concept and a practice that should be encouraged rather than being seen as the poor cousin to direct renewables powering.
We haven't stopped with just using offsets - we're a progressive values based company, sponsor many environmental groups and we recently just kicked off our tree planting initiative:
http://www.thinkhost.com/socialchange/tree-planting-hosting.shtml
By the way, we'd like to offer free setup and 3 months free hosting to readers of this blog:
Here's the coupon code:
THD99999AFM3A
Further details regarding using the coupon cand be found here:
http://www.thinkhost.com/options/hosting-coupon.shtml
Posted by: Michael Bloch | April 27, 2007 7:42 AM