I'm not sure how effective they are especially considering a lot of people don't bother using them. Personally, at the moment, it's a great marketing move. Personally, I can't justify the higher cost and I don't think anyone should feel ashamed especially if they are doing other things to help the environment

Helping the environment is a good thing.

When you say green hosting, do you mean the practice of hosting using "green" eco-friendly practices or are you talking about GreenGeeks? If you mean the latter, I had good luck with them in the past (granted, its probably been about 8ish years).

Nowadays its just a way of selling and attracting people.

TheJason said:

Is the higher cost justified?

Click to expand...

So I haven't noticed any higher costs yet.
All hosters where I have rented something have completely switched to green hosting according to their own statement. The price for hosting is getting cheaper and cheaper.

Lowering emissions and recycling is a great thing for the environment, but it can also be quite profitable.
For example, using geothermal energy you can basically use the heat that the servers provide to then power the servers more. All you need is some semi-drastic temperature changes (datacenters are known for temperature differences) and a water source, and boom - you can power the building with the same technology you need the energy for in the first place. Of course, it might need to be supplemented with other energy sources, but a combination of solar, geothermal, and other forms of clean energy are perfect for a data center. It saves a ton of money per year even if it costs a good bit upfront, but is great for the company & the planet.

There are most certainly some scam hosts out there falsely advertising green energy use, but there's also plenty of hosts that are genuinely using green energy - even if its to selfishly save cash.

I believe we should do whater we can but its advertising it like a gimmick is what i dont agree with

ForwardWeb - Branden said:

I believe we should do whater we can but its advertising it like a gimmick is what i dont agree with

Click to expand...

Well, yeah I think the hosts that are falsely saying they are green should be in trouble for false advertising... but the hosts that legitimately use green technologies are paving the way for the future 🙂 Soon enough every company will be required to use green energy to help the planet.

Ghost said:

required to use green energy to help the planet.

Click to expand...

How exactly do you want to filter electricity?

I'm confused by your comment. You mean like filtering out dirty electric on each location or power grid?

Also, I want to mention that going green doesn't mean a company will have near 0 emissions or waste, so today's standards will be greatly improved, but certain things may never similar to how they are today or less changed.

Ghost said:

You mean like filtering out dirty electric on each location or power grid?

Click to expand...

Yes, there is no green or dirty electricity in the power grid. Telling people that you only use green electricity is a lie because you can't tell if it's solar, wind, coal or nuclear.

Ah, I see what you are saying.
I think the general confusion then is that green hosting usually only refers to hosting companies that use some form of green energy or technology, and work towards lowering emissions and pollution from their buildings - it doesn't mean that they don't use any form of non-green tech.

Ghost said:

I think the general confusion then is that green hosting usually only refers to hosting companies that use some form of green energy or technology, and work towards lowering emissions and pollution from their buildings - it doesn't mean that they don't use any form of non-green tech.

Click to expand...

Many companies advertise with 100% green electricity.

@Tealk - So sorry for the long reply, but you got me doing my research and I learned some things 🙂
Yeah, there should be regulatory bodies actively going after online businesses who make unproven statements or misleading claims.
However, are we really surprised? Hosting companies also advertise "unlimited" bandwidth & disk space, but in reality there is almost always a cap on this. There's always fine print about how fast data can be transferred, so if you take the Gbps/Mbps transfer speed for your hosting service and then multiply it by 60 (data per minute), then x60 again (data per hour), then x24 (data per day), then x30 (data per month) then you can see the TRUE maximum amount of bandwidth you can have, which is definitely not "unlimited". Sure, they say unlimited, but really it's however much data can be transferred with the max data transfer speed for the given month... and on top of that cap, there's a good chance you'll hit the CPU limits if people are actually uploading/downloading that much data to your server, meaning even the bandwidth cap is sometimes higher than the server can even support with its other hardware. The fine print always says something about how much CPU you can use, restricting your server use / traffic caps.

And then there's the whole misunderstandings of "unlimited disk space" because of the other fine print that most hosts have such as... You cannot offer a file uploading / storage service on shared hosting. You can't offer big downloads on some. Certain hosts prevent large videos from being stored on your site, or even large .zip files. Some hosts even put caps on the max file size. They make it extremely difficult to even fill up a server with files without breaking their rules. Simply put, you can't really use up 10-100GB (let alone "unlimited") without breaking some of the most common rules like not storing files for users to download, videos for them to stream, or allowing them to mass upload files. Avatars are usually fine (ex: for forums on shared hosting), but large forums have been forced to move off shared hosting because they need a faster server and/or they are breaking shared rules.

Hosting is designed to get you hooked on the "unlimited" word while almost never making it possible to achieve anywhere close to unlimited.
You will find it extremely difficult to find a host that offers unlimited space/bandwidth that would let you upload 1TB of files and do anywhere close to 1TB in bandwidth each month.

So, I know I kind of went off on a tangent here, but my point is that most hosting companies are already "lying" - even if they are legally okay because of the fine print. They find new ways to lie, such as saying "unmetered bandwidth", "unmetered disk space", because they know they can technically "not monitor" those statistics, but still keep their clients in line by monitoring the CPU and data transfer speeds that will directly make the unmetered space/bandwidth become capped at certain breakpoints. It's legal, but misleading!

The 100% green energy claims are extremely misleading, but there are a few other ways they can legally call themselves green while still using non green energy.
For example, a company can use non-green energy, but buy green certificates that go towards promoting green energy & technology to offset their emissions and pollution. This allows a company to hold a certificate saying they are a green company, but still not be fully green. This is pretty standard in hosting & other industries, even in 2019. You can also do trades where Company A basically doesn't use as much electricity as they could have... So instead of just not harming the environment, they can then sell/trade their "allowable bad electricity" to Company B who is at capacity... So Company B is allowed to use X amount of non-green electricity, but instead of finding a green alternative when they have reached their annual cap, they can trade with or buy from Company A who has the allowed non-green electricity available. This way the country as a whole is always (well, hopefully) operating at a level that environmental organizations have approved. Simply put.... If Company A is allowed to eat 20 apples, and Company B can eat 30 apples... If Company A only eats 10 apples, they have 10 left, so they can then give Company B their allowable apples, meaning Company A eats 10 still and company B eats 40, so the end result in the eye of government is that Company A/B combined ate 50 apples - So they don't care about the trading/selling of apples. This is also a frequent practice with green certificates / allowable bad electric.

Ghost said:

unlimited disk space

Click to expand...

I've never read that before, at least in Germany, the providers have always indicated the size of the memory.

Ghost said:

but large forums have been forced to move off shared hosting because they need a faster server and/or they are breaking shared rules.

Click to expand...

Ok it's always wise to run your own server but that a forum has changed paths I've never heard of.

Ghost said:

You will find it extremely difficult to find a host that offers unlimited space/bandwidth

Click to expand...

This is technically not possible because memory is always limited.


Most promises are unfounded, if not lies.

we all try our best but the nature of our industry we can never be truly green nased on a component level