Does web hosting use more energy than the airline industry?

The other week I shared tips for making Internet surfing greener.

Although it doesn’t have quite the same amount of joy for the recipient, I favour sending an email to a letter from a carbon footprint perspective – it saves on paper, transportation and other resources.

However, I learned from Brain Host; a Green Web Hosting Company that if the web hosting industry continues to increase its energy consumption at the current rate, it will be responsible for more pollution than the airline industry by 2020!

Shocking isn’t it? They tell me a month of Google searches at home takes as much power as a light left on for 3 hours!

Brain Host are proud to be one of the leading green web hosting companies, taking steps to alleviate the stress their industry puts on the environment. To educate others about these harmful effects of the web hosting industry, they sent me a fantastic infographic to share with you.

They say a picture paints a thousand words and this infographic clearly shows the environmental impact of data centres. You’ll notice that a large proportion of carbon emissions comes from cooling and air conditioning. Even in a home PC you can have multiple fans to protect the hardware from over heating; when you have thousands of servers in a room, they generate a lot of heat and overheating leads to disruptions in service.

If you host a website yourself, choosing a green hosting company is a simple step you can take to reduce your carbon footprint. Brain Host ensure a smooth transition to their servers and will provide you with a badge to display on your website showing your readers you care about environmentally-responsible green hosting.

Brain Host have several strategies in place to reduce their impact on the environment:

• Their data center is strategically designed to use less cooling by eliminating ‘hot spots’
• They use low voltage servers
• They use power-efficient hardware
• The company uses natural light where possible, minimising the use of electric lighting
• Their servers are largely free from lead, halogen, and mercury
• In the office they recycle all paper, ink, and toner cartridges, as well as glass and plastic bottles, aluminum cans, cardboard, old computers and cell phones
• Employees use energy-efficient power strips that allow users to turn off all power to the connected devices at the end of the day

What about you – do you use a green hosting company? Would you make the switch to reduce your carbon footprint?