DOES IT MATTER IF YOUR HOSTING COMPANY IS GREEN?
YES it does. Because of the high power requirements of servers and the cooling infrastructure needed to support them, data centers (server farms) can be more than 40 times as energy intensive as conventional office buildings (Greenberg et al. 2006). Thus large data centers more closely resemble industrial facilities than commercial buildings with respect to energy use and with the internet boom have become a huge drain on our energy resources. Read more about the Environmental Impact of the I.T. industry.
What does this mean for your website?
According to AFCOM’s Data Center Institute (AFCOM 2006), power failures and limits on power availability will interrupt data center operations at more than 90 percent of all companies over the next five years. Which will mean more and more downtime for the websites sitting on those servers.
We are definitely in an energy crisis and our dependence on coal and oil and other dirty sources of energy is becoming a huge problem. Our dependence on the internet and the internet's dependence on fossil fuels is a big part of the crisis. We need to do things differently.
What Can Be Done?
Smart hosting companies and data centres have been moving in the right direction by starting to use energy efficient equipment and starting to buy REC's to offset the carbon emissions generated by their huge energy usage. These companies often call themselves "green".
At Little Web Feet we have gone even further. Not only do we use energy efficient equipment, reduce, reuse, recycle, offset any dirty energy we consume, and use sustainable products and services --- we have made environmental sustainability our absolute bottom line. Our office uses rainwater for all the greywater usages and geothermal energy for all the heating and cooling needs. Our data centre's servers are entirely powered and cooled by electricity that comes directly from solar panels, making our servers carbon free. And we didn't stop there either. We even buy enough REC's every month to offset the traffic footprint to all our hosted websites at NO extra cost to our customers! With the help of CO2stats we track ALL the visitor's to ALL the websites hosted on our servers, including our own, and calculate the amount and type of energy that is being used by our visitors, as well as the total network energy costs of connecting our visitors computers to our servers and offset it every month with certified renewable energy certificates! Read more about our green data centre, or our green office
We make sure we are 100% carbon neutral at every step of the process. We aren't continuing to use huge amounts of energy because we can just buy our way out of it with offsets and call ourselves green. We also didn't decide to offset because our marketing department said it was good PR. We built our company on our passion for environmental sustainability. We go far beyond most web technology companies out there, even most environmentally friendly businesses. We are simply not interested in doing business if it means the health of our planet, ourselves, or future generations will be compromised. PERIOD. In fact, it is so important to us that everyone uses servers powered with renewable energy that we are entirely willing to refer you to a competitor. If you feel Little Web Feet can't accommodate your website for whatever reason, we would be happy to recommend another hosting company which offers "green" hosting that is truly sustainable and not just posing. We have done the research and we know the real deal when we see it.
However, we firmly believe you will love our tools, our services and our technology. Because we firmly believe that it is possible to go beyond merely “offsetting” the pollution we create and find creative ways of providing reliable and intuitive technology and beautiful design that does not create any pollution at all.
When you use Little Web Feet services you can rest assured that they come at a very low cost to both you and the earth. And when you host your website on Little Web Feet servers you don’t have to worry about offsetting the carbon created by your website and your email - because there isn’t any to begin with.
read more about the differences between direct solar energy and energy credits
read more about our carbon neutral footprint
read more about how our servers work
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Environmental Sustainability 
