You may have noticed a lot of web hosting providers promoting so called “green hosting” recently. This is a trend which has taken off in the hosting world within the past year and in no small way. While pushing to be greener is certainly commendable virtually every hosting provider I have seen promoting such things either isn’t telling the whole truth or is flat out misleading the consumer. This does nothing but damage the reputation of the industry as a whole.
The Problem
So here’s an example for you. One of the largest budget hosting providers advertises: “all of our shared and reseller servers are now 130% wind powered”. This is complete nonsense. I know this for a fact as I have toured the data center in Dallas, Texas where they have their servers located as it is five minutes drive from the facility where Rochen have our own servers. Their data center has zero wind power. Not even a single server is powered by wind. This provider is not alone, there are countless others who claim to be powered by wind or solar when they are clearly not or claim to offset carbon emissions but provide no proof.
Rochen have been getting more and more potential customers asking about “green hosting” so we wanted to do what we could to address this concern but at the same time do it in an honest way that wasn’t misleading and would have real benefits for the environment as well as our business. We didn’t want to go the route the above provider and most others have which is just an outright scam. Besides, Rochen have a well enough educated client base that would see right through it anyway.
Rochen’s Honest Solution. Green Hosting Done Right.
I am pleased to say that we have taken many steps over the past couple of months, including offsetting our carbon emissions (and we have the certificate to back it up) and making other technological improvements. We announced these to existing customers at the start of November. These changes apply for all current customers as well as new customers. Our reseller web hosting customers can also take advantage of this new marketing tool.
You can read full details about the steps Rochen has taken here: http://www.rochenhost.com/about/green/
Don’t get me wrong, Rochen’s new “green hosting initiatives” are partly clever marketing (which I have nothing against) and it is an area that we still need to improve in over time. I do however strongly believe that the way we have gone about this will have real benefit for the environment while showing potential customers that we are not just out there jumping on the latest bandwagon and trying to scam them. One customer used a nice term saying that most “green hosts” are simply “green washing” and they were pleased to see Rochen was not. I couldn’t agree more.
I would encourage you to check out the above link to see what we have done and then let me know your thoughts by posting a comment to this blog. So here’s to planet Earth, doing what we can to help while keeping our marketing honest. Thanks for reading.
– Chris