It’s important to choose an eco-friendly web host!
People are often supprised when we tell them the internet is not green by any means. In fact by 2005 the web hosting industry used as much energy to power their servers as the equivalent of 14 major power plants. The world’s data centers are projected to surpass the airline industry as a greenhouse gas polluter by 2020, according to a new study by McKinsey & Company.
Currently data centres account for 2% of the worldwide greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the growth of data centre energy use is quickly outpacing the growth of other commercial building types.
Since Bear Web Development is a small, local company with a focus on helping small businesses in the Parry Sound area it wouldn’t be very efficient to run our own data center here. That’s why we’ve selected an eco-friendly solution for hosting our clients websites.
The data center where our servers are located has neutralized their carbon emissions, which are equivalent to 545 average-size homes! To become Carbon Neutral the data center started with resource conservation: turning off the lights, reducing travel, printing on both sides of the page. Efforts are being ramped up there daily to do what they do with less. The next step is to use clean, renewable energy. Without the option to put up solar panels or connect with a green power utility at this time they have instead purchased Renewable Energy Credits. Finally, to neutralize those unavoidable emissions they’ve invested in Emission Reduction Credits (a.k.a. “offsets”) which guarantee their remaining impact is effectively erased.
Carbon offsetting alone will not solve the climate crisis and its practice does not excuse anyone from taking direct, onsite action to reduce emissions. We’re always looking for more ways to reduce our resource usage around the office and the data center. In the last couple of years the data center has been deploying many more servers with notoriously power-efficient AMD processors. As processor and server technology continues to evolve we’ll follow the path of power efficiency. It just makes sense!
And since Bear Web’s Parry Sound office is located in an eco-friendly store that has undergone Canada’s ecoENERGY retrofit, prints invoices upon request on only 100% recycled paper and has two partners who are committed to reducing waste and CO2 through recycling, re-purposing, vegetarianism, walking to work, supporting local growers and producers, growing their own herbs and veggies, donating to eco-friendly charities and much more, you definitely won’t find a greener web development company locally.
