Previously I was using GooglePages to host my website. GooglePages had the advantage of being free, and because Google is supposedly Carbon Neutral, that automatically made my website Carbon Neutral. GlovePIE itself was also Carbon Neutral since I have 100% green electricity.
Unfortunately GooglePages had the disadvantage of providing hardly any bandwidth for downloading files, so nobody could download GlovePIE without using a site like RapidShare. I thank those wonderful people who mirrored files for me. It also had the disadvantage of no forum or blog. And it was going to be shut down soon by Google.
So, I decided it was about time to get myself a proper new website.
I’ve been stressing over the state of global warming and the tipping points we are rappidly approaching that could spell the end of life on Earth.
So I insisted on getting something 100% Carbon Neutral. I also needed something cheap since I don’t have a job. And I needed something that didn’t have any limits on how much users could download. And I needed a proper URL.
Surprisingly, I managed to find a number of cheap green web hosting services, and many of them provided unlimited space, unlimited downloads, and free domain names for life.
I chose this one, SuperGreenHosting.com:
because it seemed to be the cheapest and the most unlimited. I got a discount when my PayPal wasn’t working the first time, so it ended up costing me less than 10 Australian cents per day. (I probably shouldn’t have told you that, since it makes all the ads I put on the site seem greedy rather than necessary to pay for my hosting. But my girlfriend and parents were complaining that I was working for free and not making any money. So I had to abandon my previous ideological opposition to ads.)
The other service that I thought about getting for a long time was GreenGeeks.com:
They offered the same unlimited service, but they were using 300% green electricity from Wind Power instead of the normal 100%. And you can’t find better green credentials than that. It wasn’t that much more expensive than SuperGreenHosting.com, but I went with the cheapest one.
I also noticed a company called hostgator.com that went for the middle road and offers 130% green power cheaply:
Other alternatives that I found are:
Permahost.com doesn’t have a banner, but costs $10 a month.
Some other companies (like CanvasDreams.com) only offer limited plans that are a bit expensive.
Then there are two companies that take renewable electricity a step further. Rather than using offsets or carbon credits, they have a server farm that gets all its power from the solar panels on the outside of the building. I don’t think its even connected to the electricity grid. But because of that, their hosting is significantly more expensive and limited. But it’s a very impressive environmental statement and engineering feat:
Anyway, the point is… there are LOTS of carbon neutral web hosting providers out there, and they are affordable. So if you are going to make a website, like I just did, I highly recommend getting a Carbon Neutral one, rather than helping destroy the planet. It could be the first step to becoming Carbon Neutral yourself.
And that GlovePIE now has a new, and still green, website at http://glovepie.org.