I am kicking off the inaugural post of the Business Blog Spotlight by talking about two subjects that are near and dear to my heart: web hosting and renewable energy.  Web hosting is key to just about any startup internet business venture; unless you’re going to host your web site yourself, you need a hosting provider to make your web presence possible.  Renewable energy is also of particular importance to me, because I am a former climate scientist and am as familiar as anyone with the concept of global warming.  Even though I am pursuing internet business opportunities now, it is still important to me to minimize my carbon footprint, so, if my web hosting provider can help me become a carbon free online business, that makes me very happy.

Of course, going green is in vogue right now, so how do you separate the pretenders from the real deal?  Everyone and their brother is advertising things like “100% Wind Powered Hosting” and even “300% Green Hosting”…what does this even mean?  Be aware that it is easy and cheap to buy carbon offsets, and even offset 3 times the carbon that you put out (that’s what “300% Green” means), so these claims are usually little more than marketing hype.  So, where do you turn if you want to be the best online business for the planet?

If you are an environmental purist, you will probably be most interested in server farms that are powered 100% by on-site solar power.  The biggest example of this is AISO.net, which uses a combination of solar panels and batteries to run their Romoland, California, data center completely on solar power, with no need for offsets.  A number of other web hosts, including Solar Energy Host and solarhost.co.uk, have their servers hosted in the AISO data center, and thus are also 100% solar-powered.  A smaller, independent alternative is Planet Mind, of Nederland, Colorado, which uses grid-tied solar panels to produce the power used in their data center.  However, one disadvantage of all of these solar powered web hosts is that they charge more than their competitors and limit you to one or a handful of domains; this starts to get expensive if your online business ideas require a large number of domains!

Because I care about the environment, but I also care about the bottom line, I found a compromise: Host Gator.  They do advertise being “130% wind powered” based on purchasing renewable energy credits (RECs), but they do buy all of their RECs from wind farms in their home state of Texas, which I consider to be better than buying them from any random place on the carbon offset market.  They also provide unlimited domains for under $10 per month, which was key for my particular internet business model.  Since I’ve been with them, I have been very happy with their reliability and the ease of use of their system.  If you are looking for a green web host that won’t break the bank, it is hard to go wrong with Host Gator!