[LINK] Carbon-neutral web hosting

[Ivan Trundle]

Dear Linkers

My organisation is involved in a carbon audit as part of a wider- 
ranging plan to be carbon-negative (carbon-neutral is sooo last  
year), and I stumbled across the thorny issue of web hosting costs  
(environmental, not just $$$).

In my research, I have only found one company in Australia that  
offers carbon-neutral hosting services, and not many others around  
the rest of the world. Interestingly, many of these claim to be able  
to achieve carbon-neutrality by planting tress - and the jury is out  
on this as an effective strategy.

The sums are staggering - the amount of energy consumed by the  
servers of the world has more than doubled in the period 2000 to  
2005, mitigated by the fact that many newer servers consume much less  
power. And on a local level, our local electricity company wants to  
build a huge data centre, which got me thinking about the cost to our  
environment.

So if anyone is interested in adding to the pool of knowledge  
concerning carbon-neutral hosting companies in Australia, I'll start  
with Ilisys [http://www.ilisys.com.au/], a WA-based company that not  
only uses nothing but renewable energy (coal and oil, in this  
context, are not...), but also assesses its carbon footprint for car  
and air travel by staff, too.

For standard users, the cost of hosting ($20/month) is not too shabby.

Has anyone got more information to add here?

Warmly

iT

--
Ivan Trundle
http://itrundle.com ivan at itrundle.com
ph: +61 (0)418 244 259 fx: +61 (0)2 6286 8742
skype: callto://ivanovitchk