The Green Bandwagon
In addition to an alarming trend toward almost-invisible gray text against dark backgrounds, there’s another trend that in my opinion is a marketing con job – “Green” web hosting.
If you have an online business, your website, by its very nature, is green as grass – there are no gasoline fumes in cyberspace! If you’re selling products online, your customers aren’t burning gasoline to get to the mall, and you’re not paying for heating or air conditioning a location. If your customers can go online to ask you a question, or get their invoices online or emailed to them, you’re saving trees.
Supposedly the “green” hosting companies do things like recycling, donate to green charities, etc. to offset their power consumption. But who is setting the standard for this? Who does the certification – is there a certification, or some way of verifying that what they say is actually what they do? Probably not.
As someone who really cares about the environment, instead of charging you extra money every month for the things I do for the environment, I would rather encourage you to do those things yourself – eat less processed food, buy local whenever possible, recycle, drive less (you can live without a car, you know) and walk more. And use the Net!
And then you can pat yourself on the back for your contribution to the cause, more meaningful and much more tangible than a label, and much more valuable than an extra $10 on your bill each month.
Carolyn
BRAVO!!! I’ve wondered myself about that “Green Hosting” bit. I’ve seen some firms charge quite a bit more too.
Thanks for the article…
Web Wench
AFter I wrote this post, I watched King of the Hill, which was about “Green Marketing” and carbon offsets. It pretty much backed up my point of view!
Ha! Vindicated by Hank Hill! Who would have thought?
Keith Line
Actually, there is nothing green about being online. Having a website is INCREDIBLY power consumptive. Every little bit of the trail from a personal computer to the web server eats up massive amounts of power.
The DSL modem, the switches at the phone company \ ISP, the fiber \ phone line, the routers, switches and firewalls at the data center and the servers, all require power.
I agree, doing things at home and business is critical. However, doing something on the server-end is also very important. The green options are really no more expensive than regular hosting. Sure there is super-cheap hosting, but let’s talk about standard rates. There are plenty of green-er options without extra cost. It just takes a little extra time to investigate.
Web Wench
If you have a brick and mortar business, then naturally a web site adds to your power consumption. But I still believe that there are ways that the Internet can reduce our footprint. By not using gasoline, by not shopping in a store that requires power and resources to run (including precious land lost to cheap-merchandise giants like Walmart).
I have nothing against hosting companies being “green” – if they are indeed doing what they say they are doing. But is there some sort of certification, some kind of data that supports their claims? I don’t think there’s a central set of rules or guidelines – and too many people are using “green” as a marketing concept without proof that they are in fact as green as they say.