Thanks for this post! I just wanted to make mention of our company if I could - ThinkHost, Inc:

http://www.thinkhost.com/socialchange/renewable-energy-hosting.shtml

http://www.thinkhost.com/socialchange/

We'd like to offer free setup and 3 months free hosting to readers of this blog:

Here's the coupon code:

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Further details regarding using the coupon cand be found here:

http://www.thinkhost.com/options/hosting-coupon.shtml

I'd also like to offer some comments on the green hosting industry.

We use green tags. Around the world, there's an awful lot of data center infrastructure already in place and while it would be nice to have solar panels and wind turbines directly powering each one of them, it's horribly expensive at this point, somewhat wasteful of current infrastructure and is going to be some time coming.

The purchase of green tags is a great way for hosting providers to do something environmentally positive right now by ensuring the equivalent power that they use is fed into a grid somewhere from renewable sources such as solar and wind (these are the offsets we use). It's a big picture concept and a practice that should be encouraged rather than being seen as the poor cousin to direct renewables powering.

Imagine if every data center in the world started purchasing authentic green tags - that would be a wonderful thing as more renewable sourced electricity would be pumped into grids everywhere! That sort of demand would also help fund new renewable energy power generation projects over filthy coal-fired power.

When looking at a green hosting provider, it's also good to go beyond the renewable energy angle to get a greater sense of if the company is just using renewable energy as a marketing angle. What else does the company do to back this green/progressive claim?

A bit of poking around on each host's site will soon reveal how committed they are to progressive values. A host may buy green tags (or be powered directly via solar, wind, whatever), but approach other aspects of their operations in a totally non-progressive way.

You can also buy green tags yourself if you have a non-green host, but you may still be supporting a hosting company that supports all sorts of nasty stuff.

I think the whole subject of green hosting needs to be approached holistically rather than just a focus on if the company has solar panels on their roof :).

... but, I am somewhat biased :).

By the way, part of our broad commitment to progressive business practices, we've also just launched a Tree Planting initiative :)