You may have noticed a lot of web hosting providers promoting so called “green hosting” recently. This is a trend which has taken off in the hosting world within the past year and in no small way. While pushing to be greener is certainly commendable virtually every hosting provider I have seen promoting such things either isn’t telling the whole truth or is flat out misleading the consumer. This does nothing but damage the reputation of the industry as a whole.
The Problem
So here’s an example for you. One of the largest budget hosting providers advertises: “all of our shared and reseller servers are now 130% wind powered”. This is complete nonsense. I know this for a fact as I have toured the data center in Dallas, Texas where they have their servers located as it is five minutes drive from the facility where Rochen have our own servers. Their data center has zero wind power. Not even a single server is powered by wind. This provider is not alone, there are countless others who claim to be powered by wind or solar when they are clearly not or claim to offset carbon emissions but provide no proof.
Rochen have been getting more and more potential customers asking about “green hosting” so we wanted to do what we could to address this concern but at the same time do it in an honest way that wasn’t misleading and would have real benefits for the environment as well as our business. We didn’t want to go the route the above provider and most others have which is just an outright scam. Besides, Rochen have a well enough educated client base that would see right through it anyway.
Rochen’s Honest Solution. Green Hosting Done Right.
I am pleased to say that we have taken many steps over the past couple of months, including offsetting our carbon emissions (and we have the certificate to back it up) and making other technological improvements. We announced these to existing customers at the start of November. These changes apply for all current customers as well as new customers. Our reseller web hosting customers can also take advantage of this new marketing tool.
You can read full details about the steps Rochen has taken here: http://www.rochenhost.com/about/green/
Don’t get me wrong, Rochen’s new “green hosting initiatives” are partly clever marketing (which I have nothing against) and it is an area that we still need to improve in over time. I do however strongly believe that the way we have gone about this will have real benefit for the environment while showing potential customers that we are not just out there jumping on the latest bandwagon and trying to scam them. One customer used a nice term saying that most “green hosts” are simply “green washing” and they were pleased to see Rochen was not. I couldn’t agree more.
I would encourage you to check out the above link to see what we have done and then let me know your thoughts by posting a comment to this blog. So here’s to planet Earth, doing what we can to help while keeping our marketing honest. Thanks for reading.
- Chris
Tags: Green Web Hosting
I am looking for a new host with reseller accounts and i am seriously considering Rochen as my choice.
Therefore I have been reading through a lot of the information on your site, to get a feel of you guys as persons and of your business and offers of course.
Everything sounds good but when reading through this blog post I was a little thoughtful.
How can you tell from which kind of power source the data center runs on by just making a tour in their data center? I hope you did not expect to find windmills on the roof..? Could it be something in your example that I am missing or maybe things are different in the US compared to Sweden, where I live?
My point with this comment is this:
You tell us that you are doing things “the honest way” compared to other in the business, which in all aspects might be the case. In my opinion however that comparison is a hazardous approach. You are trying to put yourself in better light telling us how bad and wrong other are. The reader might find you less trustworthy especially if you don’t have the facts about the competitors right…
Just some small thoughts from Sweden
Regards
/Tommy
Hi Tommy,
Thanks for your post :-)
You raise a good question. I probably should have elaborated further as you are quite right that not having a wind farm on-site is not an indication that the facility is not wind powered.
In addition to touring the data center Rochen has been a customer of this same facility since early 2003 as well. We have reduced our business with them significantly over recent years as starting in the middle of 2006 we began moving all of our shared, reseller and MVS operations to our own hardware co-located at Colo4Dallas. Rochen now runs virtually all of our hosting operations from Colo4Dallas and are down to spending around $150k per year with this other facility.
So in addition to visiting the facility I know from speaking to the engineers and management team that they don’t utilize wind power. Don’t get me wrong though, there is nothing wrong about that as Colo4Dallas don’t use wind power either, but Rochen doesn’t promote that. What is not right though is that one of this data center’s dedicated server customers promotes their servers are ”130% wind powered” when they are not. Rochen market the fact that we offset emissions and we purchase renewable credits, but that doesn’t then make the input power source for our servers renewable.
I hope to see you aboard at Rochen soon and please feel free to email me directly via chris@rochen.com if there is anything else I can help with.
– Chris
It probably means the other kind of wind..
And 130% of anything is going to be fake from the outset :-)
The green hostings are great for business beginning. And I think that it is not a scam.
I have seen several hosting companies claim to be “green” without doing much to prove those claims. Naturally, a hosting company cannot connect themselves directly to a wind farm — that would be extremely impractical for a number of reasons. What they can do is what you guys seem to have done: team up with a provider of renewable electric power. Congrats to this initiative, which I hope will be followed by many others.
And I notice you do things to reduce the energy requirements of your server park which is also great!
Best regards, Ben