Greenprofs

If you own a green business you probably arrived at this from a environmental desires.  You probably are concerned about global warming or other environment poisons afflicting the world around us.  The green business you run is meant to create a solution to these problems.  Right?  Maybe you thought getting a website would save on printing out marketing literature, and that having a website rather than printed brochures helps establish your green credibility.  Right?

While it is true putting brochure-ware on a website saves a few trees from less printing, it still comes with an environmental impact.  Many people are studying the impact and there are starting to be solutions.

Web hosting is in many ways the face of your business.  Just as you might be careful to buy recycled paper products printed with soy ink, it says something about your green credibility to pay attention to the environmental impact of your web hosting.

Many web hosting providers are declaring themselves to offer Green and Carbon Neutral web hosting services.  In most cases they do this by purchasing renewable energy credits to offset the environmental impact inflicted by their hosting infrastructure.  But what if your preferred hosting provider isn’t green certified?  How can you be certain your entire web hosting impact is being offset by your provider?  Specifically green web hosting providers only offset their direct environmental impact.  There is a large swath of Internet infrastructure between your hosting provider and your customers.  Who is providing offsets for the rest of the Internet infrastructure?

Greenscroll has an interesting alternative.  Rather than depend on offsets purchased by your hosting providers, you as the green business owner can buy your own offsets.

They say that "have their web presence and they have their operations, so making their data centers green is the same as bakeries making their operations green", meaning that a green bakery focuses on making their business green and isn’t also ensuring the grocery stores through whom they sell products are also green.  Similarly a green web hosting company cannot (and should not) do more than green their own business infrastructure.  It does beg the question if or when the entire internet infrastructure will be green’d.

You as a green business owner are using the Internet as an aspect of your business.  You have made certain to get LEED certification for your building, so let’s talk a bit about the elements of greening the internet infrastructure used by your business.

Turning again to Greenscroll, "by going with a green host, it’s only the data center that is green, while some elements are left out – for example, all the networking equipment gluing the Internet together, visitors’ workstations, etc".  That networking equipment is pretty much invisible to Internet end users and that invisibility is a large contributing factor to believing that putting brochureware on an Internet website is itself a green decision.

Your share of the impact of the entire Internet is difficult to determine.  But isn’t that what this comes down to?  Making an offset for your share of the impact?

Some questions here are

• the proportion of your hosting provider’s impact is attributed to your website
• the proportion of your hosting provider’s bandwidth cost is attributed to your website
• the proportion of network backbone utilization is attributed to your website
• the impact of computer equipment in your own office

Given that these numbers are hard to calculate it may not be worth our while to accurately measure the impact of each specific website.  The main point is your intention, and to follow through to action which you believe is sufficient based on your impact.

At the moment Greenscroll is investing their proceeds into renewable energy credits.  They suggest a future possibility to develop their own green energy projects.  An additional factoid is that Greenscroll is a non-profit organization rather than for-profit.

They have four levels of membership fee based on the number of monthly page views on your web site.