Here at QuoteColo.com, we are firm believers in the colocation, web hosting, Cloud hosting, managed dedicated server and data center industry. We firmly believe colocation and data centers make the IT needs of companies around the world much easier and more affordable. In short, we love everything about colocation web hosting.
Due to our passion for colocation server solutions, we need to take this time to chat about a subject whom colocation and data center marketers have purposely hidden from the public: energy consumption.
Are Colocation, Web Hosting and Cloud Hosting Green?
If you are in the market for the aforementioned web hosting services, you have read about the green characteristics of data center services. Without question, you have been sent a sales brochure from a colocation company you are interested in which has a section dedicated to how green colocation solutions are. The only issue here is a colocation service provider informing a potential customer about the green properties of Cloud hosting or colocation services is only half the story.
The full story looks more like this: colocation, managed server solutions, Cloud hosting and managed dedicated server hosting is green, for the client. The entire point of colocation is to remove internal IT hardware from a dark office closet and bring them into the light of a tier 3 or tier 3 data center wherein the data center team can manage that web hosting hardware. It would then follow, for a company moving their internal IT solutions to a data center, that company will reduce their usage on electricity bills, power needs, cooling supplies and all the technical elements which make up internal server hosting. In turn, this means that company is now spending less on energy supplies technically making them greener.
Colocation, for investing companies, is green.
Colocation for data center companies is anything but.
Colocation Power Needs from the Data Center Point of View
Saying colocation is green from the data center provider point of view is a lie. Anyone who tells you differently a) has no idea what they are talking about and b) should be told their speaking privileges have been taken away. The reason why colocation from the colocation data center point of view is anything but green comes down to the amount of energy the entire data center uses per year.
As revealed by multiple surveys, the typical colocation web hosting data center facility within the United States uses as much as or more energy than a typical medium sized American city per year. Let’s state that one more time: the typical tier 2 data center uses as much as or more energy than a typical medium sized American city per year. This means a single building uses more energy than the 10,000 person town you grew up in. It means the typical colocation web hosting data center facility uses more energy on a yearly basis than the 25,000 person town you grew up in or currently live in.
One building = more energy than an average American town.
The Solution
Make no mistake about it; unless we do something about it, our data center energy problem is only going to get worse. With the Cloud expected to continue its upward adoption trend over the course of the next few years, data centers will be charged with providing the 24/7/365 solutions our market demands. That means either building more data centers, which in turn sucks up more energy or it means building data centers in a smarter and smaller fashion, so as not to use massive quantities of energy.
Now, we know what you are saying. Why in the world would a colocation hosting review site like QuoteColo bring this topic up? Isn’t this a terrible indictment of the industry QuoteColo.com so loves?
The answer is yes. It is.
That said, we bring this up because we love colocation and web hosting services. We want to see those managed service providers continue to service the market with high quality web hosting solutions. For this to happen, we in the IT industry have to a) acknowledge there is a problem and b) begin to do something about it.
This is our acknowledgement.