According to Amenworld’s recent study of over 3,500 web servers, a single web server needlessly consumes 1,000 kWh on average, producing more than 630kg of CO2 annually. The figures are certainly shocking – it’s hard to believe hosting websites on the Internet can cause such damage to our earth.

“Like other industries, the hosting industry has a role in the global effort to reduce levels of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere,” said Amenworld’s UK country manager Olivier Djidjelli.

Fortunately we are seeing more hosting companies taking up their responsibility in reducing the level of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere by moving towards green energies. I’ve found a few web hosts (servers powered by recyclable energies) that offer green hosting services in a good price; listed below are my top three preferences.

Green Hosting with Green Geeks

What makes Green Geeks environmentally friendly?

No joke, websites hosted with Green Geeks are 300% clean powered! What the hosting company does: Green Geeks purchased (and will purchase) wind energy credits (certified by Bonneville Environmental Foundation) in order to compensate for the power pull from the grid,. To live up the name "Green Geeks", the company actually does more than just replacing the power consumed – they replace, with wind power, 3 times the amount of energy used by their web servers (thus the number 300% clean powered). That’s the highest ‘Green’ factor I can found online.

Sounds unbelievable? You bet. I was skeptical in the beginning but after checking on a recent certification (thanks to Green Geeks staff T.J. Williams), I determined that the company just purchased over 2.3 million MW of clean, renewable energy in March 2009. With that, there’s no doubt Green Geeks is the ‘green-est’ hosting in the market.

Click here to visit Green Geek Hosting online.

Green Hosting with Hostgator

What makes Hostgator environmentally friendly?

All Hostgator servers are fully wind powered by purchasing certified Renewable Energy Credits (REC). More over, these wind power credits are solely generated in their home state of Texas.

Hostgator offer

Hostgator offers various level of hosting plans ranging from dedicated to shared server hosting. Their BabyGator plan is the most popular, where users get shared hosting services with unlimited storage, data transfer, and addon domain capacity at $7.95/mo. I’ve been using Hostgator for years and you can have my words on their server reliability. Hostgator hosting has a strong uptime record and I’m always pleased with their customer supports.

Click here to visit Hostgator Hosting online.

Green Hosting with Hostpapa

What makes Hostpapa environmentally friendly?

Hostpapa went green by purchasing 100% green renewable energy to power our data center, web servers, office computers, laptops and office space. These energy sources supply HostPapa’s entire equivalent energy consumption into the power-grid with certified 100% renewable green energy sources, such as wind and solar-powered energy.

Hostpapa offer

Hostpapa offer unlimited hosting in a very affordable price. For customers who signed up Hostpapa three years upfront, they’ll get unlimited storage, data transfer, and addon domain capacity plus a free domain name for life at the price of $4.95/mo. While the offer sounds great, I should however point out that they limit the usage of MySQL databases where users can’t go more than 100 databases for a single account.

Click here to visit Hostpapa Hosting online.

Green Hosting with Super Green Hosting

What makes Super Green environmentally friendly?

Super Green is 100% carbon neutral friendly hosting where cleaner servers (Dell’s Green Servers) are used and the company is involved in an ongoing tree planting project.

Super Green offer

Super Green Hosting provide unlimited hosting capacity in a very low price – $3.95/mo. I have never hosted with Super Green before but I noticed that they are providing a wide range of e-commerce features including OS Commerce, Integrated PayPal support, Agora Cart, Self-signed SSL, and merchant account support. I believe this makes them a good ‘green’ choice for business website owners.

Click here to visit Super Green Hosting online.

The Best Green Hosting Awards

The reason I picked GreenGeeks as the Best Green Hosting is simple: They are the ‘Green-nest’ and their staffs are being very responsive (I learned this via my working experience with them). What impressed me the most is that they are not only neutralizing their environmental impact (server power and cooling), they’re reversing it. At this time of writing, GreenGeeks’ server are all 300% powered (certified by Bonneville Environmental Foundation)!

Wow 300%! How is that possible?

Well, here’s how: GreenGeeks replace, with wind power, 3 times the amount of energy used by their servers. So if their servers pull 1X of power from the grid; the company purchase enough wind energy credits to put back into the grid 3X of power having been produced by wind power. For reference, figure on your right is the certificate of purchase of 2.3 million MW of clean, renewable energy of GreenGeeks.

Check out GreenGeeks green hosting plans.

How to install WordPress manually on your web host?

In case this is your first time, I suggest you try at least once at your local PC with WAMP before messing up with your hosting server.

To view your website server status, simply login to your hosting cPanel (assuming that you’re hosting on Linux and using cPanel), scroll down a little and look for a small text link named ‘Service Status’ on your left, click in to view the details.

Generally, your hosting server performance is shown here. Take Lunarpages for example (refer image below): details about cpsrvd, server load, memory used, swap used, and hard disk usage are shown.

Lunarpages Server Status Page

For reference I had captured several examples of the “Service Status page” on other hosting services. As all of these are generated based on the same module on cPanel, it’s no surprise that they look more or less the same.

Bluehost Server Status Page

Hostgator Server Status Page

Hostmonster Server Status Page

What do the numbers in server status mean?

The server service level are normally indicated in numbers and images – green light for good, yellow light for moderate, and red light for bad. However, it’s good to know what do some of these numbers mean.

In quick words:

• exim refers to the mailserver service status
• mysql refers to the database status
• eximstats refers to the mail stats reporting service status
• cpanellogd refers to the cpanel log/stats reporting service status
• httpd refers to the webserver service status
• pop up refers to the mail service status
• named refers to the DNS service status
• ftpd refers to the FTP server service status
• Server Load #.## (# cpus) refers to (well), the server load. Basically the first number is the number of processes currently in queue; while the number of cpu’s (in bracket) is the CPU capacity. Everything’s being processed without delay when the first number is smaller than the second.
• Memory Used ## % reveals how much memory (RAM) is used. The lower the percentage, the less is your server working (which is good). Overselling host will normally surfer in this section as there are more than enough server resources to be used.
• Swap Used ## % refers to the usage of secondary (virtual) memory. It’s like the backup brains for the server.
• Disk /dev/sda6 (/tmp) ## % refers to hard drive usage for temporary files (cache for example).
• Disk /dev/sda7 (/home) ## % refers to hard drive usage for main file storage
• Disk /dev/sda1 (/) ## % refers to hard drive usage for central file directories.
• Disk /dev/sda2 (/var) ## % refers to hard drive usage for systems.
• Disk /dev/sda3 (/usr) ## % refers to hard drive usage for systems.

Well then, I hope you have better understanding with your web server status by now. However, knowing the numbers is not enough. Webmasters are recommended to check their server status frequently so when something goes wrong, you can act fast enough to minimize the damage to your website.

We were talking about SimpleScripts earlier. Well here’s another post on automated script installer – Fantastico (how can I miss them!).

As you might already knew, Fantastico is a well known name for automated script installer.

The web application is developed by NetenBerg and is so widely used that more than half of the hosting companies I knew have Fantastico included in their shared hosting plan. The auto installer script can be only executed from hosting control panel like cPanel and Plesk.

Scipts in Fantastico

Although Fantastico is typically associated with open-source software, a handful of scripts are also available that install commercial products. Once installed, these are available to all of the domains hosted by a physical server; such as web site builder SohoLaunch, PerlDesk customer support software, and AccountLab Plus software for interacting with Internet registrars.

There are more than 50 applications that have Fantastico scripts associated with them, have a look below.

Who’s offering Fantastico?

Who’s offering Fantastico in their hosting plan? The answer can be very long: Hosting companies like Bluehost, Hostmonster, Hostgator, Lunarpages, WebHostingPad, and ExaBytes are all offering Fantastico. In fact at the time of writing, Fantastico’s officials claims that the auto-install scripts services are installed on ten thousand servers, with a million users worldwide, which would make it the leading product of its type.

I’m happy with Fantastico, why SimpleScripts?

Yes indeed, why switch? Frankly, I don’t see any huge plus points with SimpleScipts. While the officials are claiming that they offer better ‘versioning services’ (updating the scripts version) but there is in fact not much difference I observed. However for the geeks who like testing new stuffs, here’re the reasons why you should try SimpleScripts.

Better scripts variety

I used to work long hours learning and installing MODx CMS to my hosting – not now anymore with SimpleScripts. In this open-source era, there are just way too many free scripts around the Internet and it can’t be covered all by Fantastico. The rise of SimpleScripts allow us to have better varieties in CMS and forum scripts (MODx, DadaMail, and Magneto for example are included in SimpleScripts but not Fantastico).

Branding

If you’re running your own hosting company, SimpleScripts help you to stand out from other hosting companies as there are still (*notice ‘still’ – I expect SimpleScipts to be widely used as Fantastico) not much web hosts offering the service. Also, SimpleScripts offers branding options to avoid customer confusion. Your logo, your colors, and a customizable return link allow a high level of customization available only through SimpleScripts.

Expandable

From the view point of hosting provider, SimpleScripts offers better flexibility and reliability. Applications and features are constantly being added to improve your customer’s experience.

List of applications in SimpleScipts

Here’s the full list of what you can get with SimpleScripts.

Where can I get SimpleScipts?

As said, SimpleScipts is not included in most hosting plan. From what I know at the time of writing, Bluehost and Hostmonster are the only two that have SimpleScipts installed.

Nevertheless, I expect the applications will be soon widely used. In case you’re a web host and offer SimpleScipts in your hosting plan, kindly leave your message below – I’m sure my readers will like to learn about your services.