I’ve been a happy Dreamhost customer for over two years now. I have always been impressed with the cost effectiveness of their hosting plans, the features they offer (unlimited bandwidth, huge storage, unlimited MySQL databases) and how they listen to their customers by adding the features that we ask and vote for. But their latest announcement that they are now a carbon neutral company has made me even happier with my choice to use their services.
What does carbon neutral mean for a company like Dreamhost? They define it as…
It means we’ve calculated our carbon footprint. Our footprint represents the impact of everything that DreamHost uses and leaves behind in the course of our daily work. All of the resources that we use – paper in the office, electricity for our 1300+ servers, even the gas in our cars that bring us to the office – leaves behind some kind of soul-sucking residue in the world.
So how do they become carbon neutral…
Organizations large and small are constantly working on reducing their environmental emissions to meet government-imposed (and self-imposed) emissions caps. When they do so a neutral third party then steps in to verify the reduction and issues what are known as “emission reduction credits”. Companies like DreamHost can purchase these credits which are then immediately retired on their behalf. This effectively takes them off the market and the money goes toward funding further emission reduction projects. We are not currently able to actually power our servers with the wind or the sun, and this is the next best thing!
I personally am not convinced that simply purchasing carbon credits is good enough for long term sustainability of our climate, but it’s definately a start. My hope would be that in combination with carbon credits, they would begin using solar arrays, wind generation, and more power effective servers in their data centres. They have already begun by purchasing servers with lower powered AMD processors, so I beleive they are headed down the right path!
If your looking for a good and environmentally friendly host and want to save a bit of money sign up at Dreamhost and enter the promotion code DMM to save $60 off your first year’s hosting bill.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Buying carbon offsets or emission rights is a good way to get the last step to being carbon neutral. However, it should be the last step, not the first.
First you reduce as much as you can, and then you buy carbon credits to get that final step.
It seems they did not do the reduction step, or they just did not mention it.
Still, they are doing much more than the average hosting company, so it’s thumbs up from me.
Johan – Thanks for explaining that to me. For some reason purchasing credits just seemed like a way to erase a guilty conscience. They did make reference to purchasing lower power consuming CPU’s but it would be nice to see them doing more to reduce overall consumption.