For Green Hosting, Come to Papa

When it comes to green hosting, your papa knows best. That’s your HostPapa, of course.

HostPapa offers extraordinary values on website hosting to begin with. You can pay less than $4 a month on the 3 year plan, while getting a free domain, no setup charges, the ability to host unlimited domains, plus free ad credits to get your web marketing efforts kick-started.

Oh, but what the restrictions on storage and bandwidth? There are none. You have access to unlimited disk space and unlimited monthly bandwidth. Why, it’s almost like being the in the cloud, but with an ultra-low fixed monthly fee. All this and green, too?

What’s the green story? You may have heard that data centers are huge energy users. It’s a double whammy. First you pay for the electricity to run the servers and appliances. Then you pay again for the electricity it takes to keep the equipment cool. If you don’t keep everything in balance, the equipment fails and you are offline.

It would be nice if all that energy were being created from renewable energy sources. But, sadly, most data centers run on whatever happens to be available without regard to the type of generation. That includes many web hosting companies. They’re in the business of hosting websites, not worrying about where the electricity comes from and what it may be doing to the environment.

Well, HostPapa doesn’t feel that way. They believe in powering their servers with renewable energy sources. They might like to put up their own wind generators, but that’s not practical in most locations. An excellent alternative is to support wind and solar projects that wouldn’t otherwise be practical. You do that by purchasing renewable green energy certificates, also called green tags. Those certificates put green energy in the grid to offset coal and gas fired generators elsewhere.

HostPapa has purchased green tags equivalent to 100% of their energy consumption. Those tags come from wind, solar, and animal waste to energy projects in the Pacific NorthWest and Canada.

With HostPapa you can feel good about your environmental choice of Web Host and get an excellent deal on hosting at the same time. In addition to the standard hosting plan that works for most users, HostPapa also offers a reseller account for those want to set up their own private branded hosting services or anyone with multiple domains who wants to keep them completely separate. A reseller account is like a bundle of hosting accounts, each with its own control panel plus a master control panel for the providers.

Reseller hosting can be used to support any number of websites. The limitation is the amount of disk space and bandwidth in your account. You can start with the smallest account that will accommodate your suite of websites and upgrade as you need more room or bandwidth.

Lots of web hosting companies have a flurry of hosting plans with a myriad of different options. HostPapa simplifies this with just a standard webhosting plan with unlimited resources plus a scalable reseller plan. They also offer a special service to create a mobile version of your site. If you have customers or clients that use iPhones, Blackberries or other mobile devices, you can make it easy for them to do business with you by offering a site optimized for mobile users.

Are you interested in green hosting at a highly attractive price with all the features you need to host your sites on the Web, check out the offers from HostPapa.

Make Mine Green Hosting

What are two of the biggest challenges facing data centers right now? They’re perhaps not the ones you’re thinking of, but power and cost are real limiting factors to the growth of online everything. Some of the biggest server farms are sited not for the convenience of staff commutes or proximity to major businesses, but out in the boonies away from everything. Actually, not away from everything. What they want to be close to is huge sources of reliable power.

They say that information is power. That’s true in more ways than one. Information technology is power hungry. It takes massive quantities of kilowatts to search databases and crunch numbers, at least for the size of the data sets and the speed that we demand. Servers are machines that turn electricity into heat in the process of computing. A couple of high performance PCs can keep a small office toasty warm. Tens of thousands of rack mounted servers can cook anything nearby, if not for the air conditioning. Considering practical efficiencies of energy conversion, it can take one to two watts of electricity for cooling for every watt consumed by a server.

Data centers are power hungry monsters that have come on the scene just as we’re starting to wonder how we’re going to generate more power. The economic downturn has given us something of a reprieve in the last couple of years, but energy shortages will be back again sooner than any of us dare think. Then we’re faced with a choice of trashing the environment with coal and risking our security by dependence on foreign gas and oil, or waiting decades for additional nuclear reactors to come online. We could just give up and outsource our data center needs to other countries, but then what have we got left?

Forget the doomsday scenario. There’s a much better option and it’s in place now. It’s called green energy. Once ridiculed, both solar and wind are now serious sources of cost competitive electricity. Major solar farms are under construction in California. Windmill farms are sprouting up just about anywhere there is a steady breeze. One of the biggest wind initiatives is underway in Texas, the oil state. What do Texans know that the rest of us better figure out pretty soon? Oil is yesterday’s news. The new oil is wind.

HostGator has figured this out. They’re ahead of the curve in ensuring a reliable source of the power they need and reducing the cost of that power as well. The source is Texas wind energy. HostGator buys theirs through Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) to a Texas windfarm in the amount of 4,009 RECs. Each REC represents 1 megawatt of power, so you get an idea of the scale we’re talking about.

But HostGator doesn’t stop there. They believe in green energy so much that they’ve purchased RECs for 130% of the electricity used to power and cool all of their hosting servers. They’ve also addressed the consumption issue by increasing the electrical efficiency of the servers they use by 36%. That has a multiplier effect in that less power hungry servers also need less cooling. Smart, very smart.

The good news is that even if your business isn’t strategically located near a source of green energy or you can’t afford the capital expense of generating your own solar or wind power, you can still have green website hosting through HostGator. They already host over 4,000,000 domains representing about 1% of the world’s Internet traffic. That includes our own T1 Rex, Ether Rabbit and MPLS Networks Today sites, among others. What’s more, we get a terrific deal on reseller hosting for multiple sites. It actually costs less to get ahead of the game with HostGator than to stay stuck in the past with many conventional hosting services. Clearly, HostGator has this figured out.