Why I use HostPapa

Why Care About Going Green?

Why should you care about supporting businesses that use renewable electricity? You may think, what difference can I really make?

A business owner, an entrepreneur, an internet hobbyist, a webmaster—call yourself what you will—you are also a consumer of energy and energy products and services. Every kilowatt hour of power that you use, including running your website(s), has an effect on the rest of the world. The electricity you or the businesses you patronize purchase can either increase (if non-renewable electricity) or reduce (if renewable electricity) the overall environmental impact of that energy production and consumption. That’s a lot of power you have.

Make no mistake about it: the generation of electricity (and its resultant greenhouse gases and carbon emissions) is the single most contributing factor in the preponderance of industrial pollution throughout the world. Acid rain, soot, smog, mercury, and particulate matter (among other pollutants) are serious detriments to our health, as a people and a planet. They contribute to increased cancer rates and other harmful health risks. The World Bank reports that almost a fifth of all ill health in poor countries and millions of deaths can be attributed to environmental factors, including climate change and pollution.

And when we say “however small,” we mean it. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that each $1 spent on efforts to control carbon emissions gives us back $45 worth of health benefits – in the form of less work days lost to sickness, less visits to the doctor, less people hospitalized, and a lower rate of premature deaths. ONE DOLLAR! How much do you spend on power each month? Multiply that by $45 and imagine how many lives you can save.

The World Watch Institute puts the number, should we implement policies to control, prevent, and reduce global warming, at 8 million environment-related deaths prevented over a 20-year period.

But is renewable electricity good for your business’s bottom line? You may not even believe how much! Since renewable electricity sources like hydro, solar, and wind power do not involve fuel or transportation costs, you – the business-owner – can count on greater price stability. As our civilization continues to deplete the world’s natural resources at a breakneck pace, relying on natural “alternative” sources of energy, or renewable electricity, provides your business (and consequently the world) with greater energy security. In other words, you know you won’t be running out of power this way, and you won’t be contributing to the imminent depletion of power generated by, shall we say, less renewable methods.

Using renewable electricity also contributes in many significant ways to economic development – specifically saving consumers a ton of money that can otherwise be used for greater affluence and poured into the economy in other, more proactive ways. Renewable energy encourages development of the economy in the form of greater capital investments, such as money to ranchers, farmers, landowners, and tax revenues. It also helps to establish more jobs, as renewable electricity creates approximately twice as many job opportunities as its non-renewable counterpart.

Moreover, the increased awareness that a self-avowed and third-party certified green website raises produces a chain reaction of consciousness and conscientiousness across the worldwide web and the world itself.

As “green” consciousness is spreading, consumers in all areas are starting to look to the businesses they patronize to take the lead in protecting and preserving our environment. That means now, more than any other time in our history, if a consumer is given a choice between a web hosting provider, for example, or a commercial website like yours that provides some other product or service, but that is hosted by a web hosting company that uses renewable electricity versus one that doesn’t – all other factors being equal – he or she will almost invariably choose the green business – or that one that supports renewable electricity.

Why go green? Why support green businesses that utilize renewable energy, like HostPapa web hosting, to help you in your business and personal endeavours? Because it works! On a very practical level, recycling one aluminum can saves enough electricity to power a television for six full hours. Recycling one glass bottle saves enough energy to keep a 100-watt bulb lit for four hours. And when a business recycles a single ton of paper, it is able to save over 350 gallons of oil, about 7,000 of water, and enough electricity to run an average home for half a year. You can’t beat that with a fossil fuel.

What is Green Energy?

Green tags are created when wind power or other renewable energy is substituted for traditional power. The result is a shift away from our dependence on burning fossil fuel to produce electricity. Using clean renewable energy is friendly to the environment and reduces emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Green tags represent the real savings in carbon dioxide and other pollutants that occur when green power replaces burning fossil fuel.

Renewable energy is still a little more expensive than buying traditional power, so Green tags are purchased in addition to the electricity that you are now using. Buying Green tags has the same effect as buying green power. Both replace fossil fuel generators with clean renewables, and both have exactly the same environmental benefits.

The purchase of green tags, which are also called renewable energy certificates, supports the production of renewable energy. Participants continue to receive a separate electricity bill from that provided by their utility company. For every unit of renewable energy generated, equivalent amounts of Green tags (renewable certificates) are produced. Green tags support new renewable electricity generation, which offsets the environmental effects of burning coal, gas, and other fossil fuels in the region where the renewable generator is located, and helps shift the overall energy mix toward more renewable resources. Also, Green tags help build a market for renewable energy, reduce global climate change, and may have other environmental benefits such as reducing regional air pollution.

The source of our 100% renewable Green tag energy that ultimately supplies the HostPapa servers comes from a multiple of sources, including:

• Condon Wind Facility (Gilliam County, OR)
• Foote Creek Wind Facility (Carbon County, WY)
• Klondike Wind Facility (Sherman County, OR)
• Northwest Small Wind Co-op (WA, MT)
• Northwest Solar Co-op (OR, WA)
• Portland Brewery Blocks (Portland, OR)
• Solar Ashland (Ashland, OR)
• Stateline Wind Facility (Walla Walla County, WA; Umatilla County, OR)
• Summerview Wind Facility (Pincher Creek, Alberta, Canada)
• Tillamook Animal Waste to Energy (Tillamook, OR)
• Washington State School for the Blind (Vancouver, WA)
• White Bluffs/Hanford (White Bluffs, WA)

The above facilities replace our energy consumption by supplying the power grid with our equivalent energy requirements of 100% green energy from wind and solar energy providers.

We at HostPapa are proud of the fact that our company is making the world a cleaner and healthier place. All of our equipment including servers, data centres, power allotment, and even our office computers and laptops are powered by 100% renewable and environmentally-friendly energy. We intend to continue investing in these alternative energy sources, even with the rapid growth rates and expansion of our company and related equipment.

Green Hosting from HostPapa

100% Powered by Certified Green Renewable Energy Sources

Yes, it’s true! Our energy is certified by the following sources:

HostPapa has taken the initiative of going green by purchasing 100% green renewable energy to power our data centres, 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.

How do we do it?

We certainly do not have a wind turbine on the roof of our data centre! Sure, it would be a neat thing to have, but that is not the case. After an energy audit by an outside provider to calculate our total electrical energy consumption from traditional sources, HostPapa purchased “green energy tags” or certificates from a certified green energy supplier. That supplier calculates the total energy consumption of our operation and uses their suppliers of green energy to pump in 100% equivalent energy back into the power grid. This effectively cuts down on the carbon dioxide-producing (CO2) energy that we normally would have required from non-green energy sources.

Since we started to purchase green energy, we have removed over 100,000 kg (over 200,000 lbs) of CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gases affecting our environment. That’s the equivalent of removing 20 cars from the highway each year!

By purchasing the green energy certificates, we have completely offset the amount of greenhouse gas production by our current electricity providers with certified wind and solar-power providers.

Why did we do it?

Simply put, we did it because of our commitment to corporate responsibility and to the environment. Ultimately, we wanted to be the green leader in web hosting. The servers and equipment we use here at HostPapa run 24 hours per day and consume a great deal of electricity. Why should we burden the world just because we require that electricity to light up our servers? If we need the electricity for our operation, let’s buy it from clean-energy sources and contribute positively to our environment.