Is Green Web Hosting the future of the web? Count on that. Future of the Internet: Green Web Hosting
The World Wide Web is powered by electricity, although we don’t normally think about it. But the fact is, without electricity you wouldn’t be reading this. You would crouch in front of the fireplace and read the newspaper by the dim light of a whale-oil lamp. Sounds like fun?
it wasn’t. Actually, it was pretty boring compared to today’s snapshot available only on the W3. If it happens anywhere from Tehran to Terre Haute, it spreads virally across the digital landscape in seconds. That news also consumes electricity like it’s nobody’s business.
So is green hosting the wave of the web of the future? Yes. And if you’re not riding the crest of that wave, you’ll be left behind in the digital dust. An energy chewing website is so “last millennium”.
The ever-expanding World Wide Web
Some facts about green hosting:
- Currently there are more than 125 million websites online.
- Every day, 6,000 new websites are launched, carrying with them the dreams and visions of web entrepreneurs looking to become the next Amazon.
- Each website is on a server that requires electricity to run and cool it. That requires a lot of electricity.
- The electricity bill from a successful web host would make a grown man cry. It’s huge. Many web hosts pay thousands of dollars a month to keep their servers up and running.
- The electricity consumption used by web servers doubled in just five years.
- With the advent of Web 2.0 features like video, VoIP, streaming TV, and other “must haves,” the web will only expand the demand for more and more electricity.
- Experts suggest that web server power consumption will continue to double every five years, and studies show that these web professionals are actually being conservative. Some “green” bloggers suggest that the amount of electricity consumed by web servers will double every 30 months.
- Power consumption to power the W3 grows exponentially, doubling, then quadrupling and so on. The power demand of web servers will increase at a phenomenal rate.
- As the world wide web grows in both size and functionality, website owners will need increasing amounts of bandwidth to avoid long download times.
What are web servers and why do they consume energy?
Do a Google search for web hosts and see what comes up.
You will get 149,000,000 search results for web hosts. Now, not all of these SERP links are for actual web hosts. Some are for review sites (using web hosts), web host blogs (using a web host to bring their blogs to the masses), and even SERP links to vendors, resellers, and resellers of hosting services.
Hosting is a commodity on the web. You or I can buy web server space and open our own hosting company. Master Host provides all the tools and support you need to create your own head office hosting company. (The one that gets flooded from time to time. Oops.)
A web server can be a kid on the street, or it can be a huge physical plant with chip heads servicing the servers, customer support taking calls from subscribers, and office staff taking care of routine business matters, such as paying the Electric company.
What is a server? Well, in simpler terms, a server isn’t much more than a huge hard drive in a box. Your website (or future website) resides on one of these server hard drives, along with hundreds of other websites. Today, server disk space is measured in terabytes.
What is a terabyte? A measure of bits and bytes on steroids. A terabyte is the equivalent of 1,000 gigabytes. More dramatically, a terabyte equals 1,000,000,000,000 bytes, or 10 to the 12th power of bytes.
That new computer you just bought MIGHT have a 500 gigabyte hard drive. A server has tens of terabytes of storage. It also has tons of RAM (128 gigabytes of RAM is not unusual) so that the server can deliver the required bandwidth for fast downloads from all the sites stored on that server.
In other words, web hosting companies consume a lot of electricity with rack after rack of servers all sucking electricity from the network.
Facebook alone employs 30,000 servers as of October 2009 and that number is growing daily as more and more of us connect through this social networking site. Amazon employs thousands of servers. Microsoft, Verizon and all your other favorite sites employ thousands of servers connected in clusters,
In other words, there are millions of servers storing terabytes of information available to you on W3. Yes, even your little blog consumes electricity.
green accommodation
So while we may not think about energy consumption when claiming digital real estate, building and launching a website, we are increasing the demand for more and more electricity.
Now comes green hosting: hosting companies that use “green” technology to reduce demand for electricity generated by coal and gas-fired power plants. These companies recognize that green hosting is inevitable as energy costs rise and we continue to spew tons of airborne pollutants into the atmosphere every day.
Things aren’t going to get better, folks, unless our corporate culture turns around and stops consuming available energy. Major cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix already experience rolling blackouts as parts of the power grid shut down for a while. New York City broadcasts “please turn off your air conditioners” on the hottest days of summer, and blackouts are almost routine.
Green hosting is leading the way in the way American companies conduct business online by employing green energy sources to power their servers.
A green host does not add to the demand for more electricity from traditional sources. Instead, these forward-thinking companies employ new technology: solar power, wind power, deep ground power, hydroelectric (where available), and biofuels that can be regenerated from another crop of corn.
But web hosting is much more than just storing websites on gigantic hard drives. It’s not just about ROMs. It’s also about RAM, which translates to the speed at which your website engages with site visitors. It better be quick. Studies reveal that 90% of us will expect a 10-second download, while only 10% will expect a 30-second download. We have become that impatient.
From a site owner’s perspective, that statistic translates to losing 80% of their leads in that 20-second download window. So you want more RAM, more bandwidth, and unrestricted access to the server’s CPU and other shared assets—parts of the server you share with other sites.
The hosts employ the latest in fiber optic technology, increase RAM memory and offer even faster fast downloads. Green web hosts do this without further straining the power system we rely on to log on, watch TV and cook dinner by using non-traditional resources to power up your website every time a site visitor stops by.
cool it down
In addition to providing more bandwidth for you and your site visitors, and easier access to server CPUs, servers need to be cooled.
Even your PC pumps out a lot of heat, and heat is the enemy of all those circuit boards, CPUs, and other electronics inside the case. Now multiply that by thousands: tens of thousands of servers humming and pumping heat. To keep these servers happy, they need to be cooled.
Traditional hosts add to the demand for more power by cooling servers with cold air. The server room at a hosting company is kept cool—so cool you could probably store beef parts in there if server racks didn’t take up so much space. That cooling requires energy and lots of it.
Green hosts, once again, employ state-of-the-art technology to cool down those thousands of servers. They use cold water, discharged through an airtight system, to cool the server room, reducing the demand for more and more cold air from the local coal-burning power plant.
Make a statement: We are Green
Getting a bit of recognition on the W3 is hard, even in a niche market (especially a niche market). You have less than 10 seconds to convince a site visitor to stay long enough to learn about the quality of your services, your products, or your message. Internet users are overloaded with information. If they don’t see what they want to see on your home page or landing page, they bounce.
So making a statement about your corporate culture and core business values has to happen in the blink of an eye. Visitors won’t even see the “About Us” page if you don’t create a good impression, within 10 seconds!
An emblem or banner proclaiming that it employs green accommodation makes an immediate statement about your online business. He says that you care about the environment. He says that you care about the future of the planet and our children and grandchildren who will populate the Earth in 25, 50 or 100 years from now.
That “green” badge of honor also bestows a stash of cutting-edge technology. You get it. Your online business uses green hosting because you recognize the importance of this fledgling movement.
There are not many green hosts even today. However, more hosts will soon recognize that green is the only way to go. And those few green hosts out there now?
You are making a statement about your company culture, a statement that is conveyed to your business when you display a green host emblem or banner.
Who said that it is not easy to be green? Today, green accommodation makes a statement about you and your business – a positive statement.
And with less than 10 seconds to make a good first impression, that “green” host badge goes a long, long way to making the right statement quickly.
Yes we got it. we are green Stay and learn more.