In today’s changing environment, it is important to maintain a moral and eco-friendly stand regarding every choice, service or product we purchase. Starting with paper and biodegradable products instead of plastic products, hybrid and electric cars instead of gasoline and diesel, solar power instead of fossil fuel, bio-degradable cosmetics instead of polluting aerosols. The same stance should be taken when talking about digital services, such as social media, subscription-based services such as Netflix and yes, when also talking about web hosting.
It is hard to imagine talking about an environment-friendly attitude when talking about electronics and digital services, that are made from non-recyclable materials and consumes a lot of power, both for powering servers and network equipment, but also for cooling it in hot weather.
But some data centers and web hosting providers take the climate change threat quite seriously and are taking active steps into protecting the environment.
1) Buying energy efficient equipment
More and more companies buy the latest technology when doing acquisitions and expanding their services. This is done for two reasons, one because they come with the best performance available on the market, which makes them more attractive for customers, and two, because these components use less energy than their predecessors. In a few years, a company can slash their energy requirements by 30% but increase their overall performance by more than 50%, by keeping the same amount of servers or data center space. When talking about micro-servers and blade servers, you can fit up to 16 servers in a 4U space, which just 5 years ago, would have needed 16U spaces for the same amount of processing power.
2) Invest in a natural cooling
The latest trend when building new data centers, especially when talking about web hosting giants such as Google and Amazon, is to build them into a naturally cool environment, in countries such as Canada, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and so on. With the advance of networking, you can have a data center north of the Arctic Circle, with minimal lag or high latency.
By using passive cooling systems that take advantage of the cold environment outside, providers can exchange the hot air between the racks with the cold air outside, without the need to use energy-intensive AC units.
3) Using renewable power sources
With the advance of renewable power sources, web hosting providers have a wide variety of energy sources for their devices, such as wind, solar and even hydroelectricity. Using a combined solution of multiple power sources, a data center can power their servers on a 24/7 basis using solar during the day, wind and hydro during the night, or if the data center is located near a large water source, hydroelectricity on a nonstop basis. In recent years, geothermal electricity is on the rise among large companies, that is nonstop free energy coming from the hot water found in the depths of the earth’s crust.
So regardless of your geographical location and web hosting needs, there is a wide variety of web hosting providers offering eco-friendly options and that trend is likely to increase as time goes by.