Can Web Hosting be Environmentally Friendly?
Unfortunately, the web hosting which all of us utilise isn't particularly friendly to the environment. In fact, it is so un eco-friendly that it's carbon footprint is on a par with the airline industry.
There have been efforts made by some web hosts to try to combat this increasing problem. Methods used to rain in the carbon useage include; solar panels to supply some of the electricity for the servers, wind turbines to produce as much of the needed power possible and carbon offsetting to reduce the effect of the extra carbon released.
The carbon offsetting may be the easiest and perhaps the most effective way for web hosting to become eco-friendly. The process simply involves planting trees to cover the amount of carbon which is released through the use of the web servers.
Change Your Web Host to be More Eco-friendly
Planting trees can be more effective to reduce the enviromental damage, because you aren't actually using industrial processes which will almost certainly release carbon and pollution during the manufacturing cycle. Solar panel production is fairly notorious for this and then you have the problem of producing the batteries in a remotely environmentally sound way.
The possibility of eco-friendly web hosting wasn't something I had previously considered, but after discovering how much of a problem the electricity use by web servers actually is, I shall in the future change to hosting which takes this in to consideration. I was also surprised to find that eco-friendly web hosting doesn't actually cost any more than ordinary web hosting.