Zit Seng's Blog

A Singaporean's technology and lifestyle blog

ZitSeng.Com Moves and Goes Green

It’s the Lunar New Year of the Horse. Welcome back to ZitSeng.com. I mentioned previously some changes that will happen to this site. The first one has happened, but there’s perhaps not much to be noticed. That’s because the change has happened under the hood. We have moved to a new hosting provider. It’s not just another hosting provider, but one that is Green.

We are now hosting on GreenGeeks. This web hosting company is a United States Environmental Protection Agency’s Green Power Partner. I realise, for most people, whether a website is green or not makes no appreciable difference to them. They just want to access content, and how the content was hosted doesn’t matter so much.

Going green, however, helps us make the world a better place to live in, not just for ourselves, but also for our future generations.

This is something I’ve been planning to do for some time. In fact, when I was considering my last hosting provider, I had also explored several green web hosting providers. GreenGeeks was also considered. In the end, I chose BlueHost. Green was good. But green web hosting providers didn’t offer me the right combination of value and features.

ZitSeng.Com has been hosting with BlueHost for almost three years. The three year contract will expire soon. It would be time for me to decide to renew with BlueHost or consider another web hosting provider.

There is nothing really wrong with BlueHost. Their service has been very reliable. They have all the features I need. Their resource caps (CPU usage) hasn’t been much of an issue. Their network is fast, their servers are modern, and their software platform is up-to-date. In short, I would consider to renew with BlueHost, if not for my desire to find a green web hosting provider.

GreenGeeks again came up for consideration. There are other providers too, such as iPage, that i shortlisted. In fact, I went as far as to sign up for iPage, but I quickly found it was not suitable for me. iPage does not provide SSH shell access. This was a deal breaker for me. Here’s a short list of other green web hosting providers in case you’re interested in checking them out: HostGator and HostPapa.

I finally settled on GreenGreeks. They offered a plan that was largely similar in features as what I had been getting with BlueHost.

Like most other green web hosting companies, GreenGeeks is not green because they actually use green energy to run their servers. They still run on electricity drawn from the power grid. However, for as much power they draw from the grid, they purchase three times as much wind energy in the form of credits. The energy from the wind energy generating company does get put back into the power grid. So for every 1 kWh that GreenGeeks consumes from the power grid, they buy 3 kWh of green energy to return into the power grid.

There are true green web hosting companies that really run on green energy such as wind power. An example is AISO.net. There are very few web hosting companies that actually run on green power. You would have limited choices if this is what you want.

Unfortunately, AISO.net did not have the sort of plan that I was looking for. GreenGeeks will do for me. Their way of going green does mean we ultimately burn less fuels to generate the electricity we need. It’s a step in the right direction towards saving our Earth.

Affiliate Disclosure: ZitSeng.Com is a GreenGeeks affiliate. We do receive a commission on sales that result from clicking on our GreenGeeks link. Please read our affiliate disclosure statement.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

View Comment Policy