Green hosting

Currently, Duplika carries out an environmental commitment, by means of which it undertakes to plant a tree for each client who contracts one of our plans of Hosting Condor.

However, beyond this initiative that we have chosen, there is a large number of ideas and initiatives underway around the concept of ecological hosting (green hosting), which relate the provision of hosting services to environmental care.

What is the relationship between hosting and the environment?

AMD, on its corporate site, explains it this way: “In 2005, the total consumption of the US servers was equivalent to 0.6% of the total electricity consumption of the entire US. If we add to this the consumption of the refrigeration equipment necessary to keep the datacenters cold, the consumption doubles, that is, 1.2%. And the number is increasing every year. The production of all this energy generates, at the same time, the emission of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere.”

At the same time, a study carried out by McKinsey & Co. and published by The New York Times provides more up-to-date figures and projects that, by 2020, the energy consumption by webhosting companies will exceed the consumption of the aeronautical industry.

Around this problem, there are basically two approaches: prevention, trying to avoid the inefficient use of resources, and repair, trying to generate purposeful initiatives, such as planting new trees.

Other initiatives aim to ensure that the energy used in hosting servers comes from renewable sources, either totally or partially.

The decision to use hosting services that maintain a commitment to the environment should not only be found in the environmentalist conviction of those who choose this type of solution (which, ideally, should be the only case), but also in the growing importance of subject in the areas of marketing (GreenMarketing) and CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) that seek, from this type of actions, to accompany the world trend of caring for the environment.

The ability to contribute to caring for the environment also reaches many other areas directly related to hosting, such as web development.

The development of efficient systems, applications and graphic resolutions (that is, with a high degree of optimization of resources) contributes decisively to avoiding the waste of energy used by the processors to process the necessary information.

A great effort on the part of the hosting to be eco-friendly will be of little use if the web developers then give free rein to an uncontrolled party of resource use, throwing overboard the work done by the previous link.

Some technology leaders, like Google, with thousands and thousands of servers, seem to be making great efforts to be more energy efficient, although many still consider them insufficient.

Since much of the energy is used for cooling, More and more projects for the construction of data centers choose low-temperature countries, such as Iceland, for their location.

Fortunately, as in many other fields, being green in the world of the web is also often cheaper, since a large part of the solution lies in not wasting resources (ie saving energy). What else do we need to decide to contribute?