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How to Choose the Best Green Cloud Hosting Provider

Posted by QuoteColo on November 17, 2014 - Updated on December 05, 2014

If you are outside the world of Cloud or you have been on the hunt to find a great green Cloud Computing company, you may have the idea that the technology operates within an environmentally friendly system. For the past few years the basic marketing line behind VPS technology and Cloud based solutions has been how environmentally friendly the hosting service is compared to the traditional computing model.

While this is true – Cloud Hosting is a cleaner tech than onsite traditional computing solutions – when looking to invest in environmentally clean hosting services, you need to understand how the environment operates. Once you do, you are going to understand why finding truly green web hosting solutions can prove to be a very tough task.

With that thought in mind, we present three key tips to choose the best green Cloud Hosting provider.

  • Understand How Data Centers Operate

Before you even begin searching for “Green Cloud Hosting Providers” or “Environmentally Friendly Web Hosting Solutions”, we need to give you the skinny on what the term “green” means when speaking about data centers and web hosting. Currently, if your company utilizes the traditional computing model, i.e. you house your phone and email servers in the office – you’re not operating in a green manner. The traditional model of business computing means your company uses a ton of energy per year running web servers 24/7/365 to maintain your internal network, keep your communications live and to ensure security of your valuable company data.

green data centers

Not only are those servers eating up power 24/7/365 just to stay on, they are also eating up power staying cool 24/7/365. Remember, web servers create a lot of heat. To keep them running at prime temperature, outside cooling gear is needed. That gear eats into your companies’ energy consumption.

To get around the traditional energy sucking platform of traditional onsite computing, the Cloud works by outsourcing all the aforementioned computing needs into a managed data center wherein your gear and digital footprint is professionally managed. Moving to Cloud Hosting means migrating your internal IT footprint to an external facility designed to lower carbon emissions via environmentally friendly hosting equipment.

This is true. Yet, like everything, there is a dark lining amongst the silver.

Data Centers Use City Size Quantities of Energy

Shifting your internal green footprint to a data center does not mean you are wholly cutting down on carbon emissions; rather it means you are cutting down on your internal carbon emissions in favor of larger external output. This is to say, moving to green Cloud Hosting means being part of a data center infrastructure which can use and suck in as much energy per month as a medium sized American city per year. There is no hiding this fact. Data centers eat up a ton of energy and produce a ton of bas environmental emissions. There is no questioning that.

us data center power consumption

Moving from internal traditional computing solutions to green Cloud hosting services means reducing your internal carbon footprint in favor of maximizing your external carbon footprint.

This said, now that you understand what moving into a green Cloud Hosting solution means as per environmental impact, we can discuss a few tips for choosing the best green Cloud provider to meet your needs.

  • Search Terms and Renewable Energy Data Centers

The first tip we have for you to enable you to locate green Cloud Hosting services is search query.

SEO Your Search Results

As mentioned above, the first thing you need to do to locate your hosting provider of choice is to search for target keywords speaking to environmentally friendly Cloud hosting. Point in case, if you Google “web hosting solutions” or “web hosting services”, you aren’t all that likely to have a SERP filled with green VPS companies.

On the other hand, if you perform a targeted search query for “green web hosting”, “green Cloud Hosting” or “green Cloud VPS”, you are more likely to get a SERP full of environmentally marketed hosting solutions.

Moreover, to get more targeted SERP’s, conduct your search queries starting with the ~. When using the ~, search queries pull true synonyms of your original query. This means conducting a targeted search for “~Green Cloud Hosting” will produce a SERP speaking to:

  • “Green cloud hosting reviews”
  • “Cloud and Green Computing”
  • “Green Cloud Computing”

green cloud hosting google search

If you don’t use the ~, your search results will yield:

  • “Best Cloud Server Hosting”
  • “Cloud Hosting Offers”
  • Enterprise Cloud cPanel”

As you can see, the ~ makes all the difference. 

Search for Renewable Energy Data Centers

Just like a paper towel company which makes it their business to produce products using composted paper, there are data centers in operation which make it their business to operate wholly on renewable energy as opposed to tapping into existing power grids.

When searching for “renewable energy data centers” or “~renewable energy Cloud Hosting”, be on the lookout for any company which harness green energy sources (hydro, wind farms) as opposed to typical coal based power plants.

How to find these? Beyond searching for the aforementioned, most truly green Cloud hosting companies will have an internal website page speaking to their environmental efforts. Either slated under the company FAQ or some variation of rootdomain.com/greentechnology, these companies will lay out their efforts to make use of renewable energies and how those energies impact day-to-day operations of onsite Cloud servers.

Another major component of a green data center is how they consume and use energy. In terms of web hosting, you can limit your green footprint by following this advice:

  • When researching data centers, find out the facilities who are working to decommission little utilized servers. Gartner has issues many reports stating as high as 30% of all servers in a data center are flipped on yet aren’t being used. They are simply eating energy for no good reason. To get around this, work with a data center provider who constantly shuts off servers no longer needed. 
  • In the same vein, only work with data center providers who are actively working to consolidate hardly used web servers. For servers which are only being used 5% – 15% of the time, ask your Cloud hosting provider if they are working to consolidate said servers to produce energy savings. 
  • Understand the data storage policy of your provider. No, that isn’t a typo. The way in which data is stored makes a difference to how much energy your servers will be using up. Before investing in a green Cloud Hosting company, ask them how they handle duplicated data running on multiple servers. If they are not working to limit multiple duplications of verbatim data across multiple servers into one or two locations, they aren’t pulling their weight. This means you will pay more. 
  • Host with Hot Aisle/Cold Aisle Cloud Providers. Some data centers face the fronts of servers facing one another while the backs of the servers face one another. This set up creates a hot aisle and cold aisle which works to drastically reduce the flow of hot air over cooling servers. The setup, front-to-front and back-to-back, streamlines server energy use by keeping units cool and limiting hot air flow. 
  • Work with data center providers who make use of evaporation. All data centers have a single or multiple cooling towers. Those towers produce condensation and evaporation. A great way to become a green Cloud Hosting firm is to use the evaporation produced by cooling towers to make chilled water. This cold water can be pumped back into the cooling system helping to lower the cost of cooling equipment. Energy Star has stated this type of cooling can lower the cost of chilled water by as much as 70% in the winter. 
  • Turn Your Servers Off, Sometimes

Here is a hard truth to swallow: there is only so much data center and green Cloud hosting companies can do to be truly green. Data centers run 24/7/365 without stop. As business is global, companies need their servers to run around the clock. Yet, if you are a company which doesn’t require round the clock access or requires limited round the cloud operation, it’s in your best interest to ask your provider to turn all or some of your servers off when you know they aren’t in use.

If you know 95% of your business happens 9 – 6 during the week, from 11 PM to 4 AM on the weekdays, turn off a good portion of your Cloud servers. The same goes for the weekend.

Turning off your web hosting gear might sound insane yet it also might pay off in the end through energy cost savings.

Choosing the Best Green Cloud Hosting Provider

As noted, choosing the best green Cloud Hosting provider is a combination of many moving parts. You need to know how to search. You need to know how data centers use energy. You need to understand where you can skimp and where you can’t.

Finding truly green web hosting is a two way street. Your provider has to be up to the task and you have to be right there with them. Saving the planet is tough work. We all need to pitch in.

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