How the Cloud Promotes Green Credentials

With businesses looking to cut their carbon footprint where possible, choosing a cloud web hosting solution is one recommended way of achieving this because of the consolidation of resources that it provides. At present many large businesses rely on clusters of dedicated servers to provide them with the power that they require to run their web operations; however, dedicated servers cost a lot to run and manage, not to mention that they use up large amounts of electricity, which is where the benefits of consolidation come into play. The cloud provides businesses with a virtual environment in which they can setup their own dedicated virtual machines and the wide availability of resources makes it possible to create virtual machines that can match the power of a single dedicated server with ease; this type of environment makes it easy for larger businesses to consolidate their dedicated servers farms into smaller collections as a single high-specification dedicated server can provide the same level of performance as several lower-specification servers when these are virtualized. Now, the cloud has the potential to promote green hosting when you consider that a single physical server can take the role of several other physical servers when these are virtualized onto one server, therefore meaning that the total power consumption is going to be less – for large businesses that have many, many physical servers this does represent good opportunity to cut down on costs and carbon output. Many data centres are taking steps to provide a majority of their customers with green power, meaning that a large amount of the power provided to server comes from renewable sources such as wind farms and solar panel installations; if you choose a hosting provider that hosts their cloud in such a data centre then you can see this as a way of reducing your carbon footprint further.

Why should I be concerned about Green Hosting?

Any business should be conscious of its public image as this is what potential and present customers will judge them on, so failure to promote a good public image can result in lost sales as potential customers opt for competitors instead. An important part of maintaining a good public image for any business is to show a positive attitude to the environment and one way in which this can be achieved is by opting for Green Hosting solutions. Even though a Green Hosting solution may add slightly more to your monthly hosting bill, any good Green Hosting company should be able to provide you at least an estimation as to the amount or carbon is being saved – you can then count this towards the reduction in your carbon footprint, something that your customers are likely to take seriously as the size of the issue increases. The shareholders of Public companies may also be interested as to the amount of Carbon that is being produced by businesses that they have holdings in so under some circumstances this is even an item for company reports.

Why should I consider cloud web hosting?

Cloud web hosting is being pushed out by most web hosting providers now as the most reliable platform that they have to offer their customers because a well-managed cloud environment can easily offer 100% guaranteed uptime. There are no OS restrictions in the cloud, often you can setup both Windows and Linux virtual machines within the confinements of the same cloud which in-turn will allow you to manage your VMs from a single control panel from which you will also be able to monitor the resource usage of your virtual machines with ease. The main emphasis of the cloud is to provide a scalable environment in which uptime will never be compromised and this is successfully achieved through a number of different methods, namely allowing users to configure the resources of their virtual machines to increase as the demand on each individual machine increases, only for the added resources to be reduced once demand begins to tail-off. For many businesses the cloud represents the “green ethic” that they are trying to following without compromising on the price that they are paying, making it the ideal candidate for those looking to save costs (which at the moment is most businesses).

Migrating to Cloud Hosting

The more servers you have, the more complicated the task of migrating to the cloud is going to be. Unless you choose to put together your own cloud infrastructure (which will be costly and time consuming), your web hosting provider should be able to provide you with assistance in migrating data and setting up/configuring virtual machines – especially if you are purchasing cloud web hosting from your dedicated server hosting provider. In some cases you will be able to create images of the physical disks of your dedicated servers and then import these images into the cloud; from here you can then merge these images with your virtual machines in order to create VMs that mirror the configurations you have used previously as well as any related data, therefore saving you quite a bit of work when it comes to system configuration.

In conclusion, it can be said that the cloud promotes green hosting credentials by pushing for the consolidation of server resources into a fewer number of servers with the option of virtual machines allowing many larger businesses to achieve this. As public image is a large consideration for any business these days, the expenses related to migrating to cloud hosting from dedicated server hosting are often justifiable, especially when paired with the cost savings that are to be had over the long term. Although there are many web hosting providers claiming to offer ‘green hosting’, it is important for you to choose a company that you are sure can provide you with reliable information as to how their hosting services are being environmentally friendly and how this can count towards the reduction of your own carbon footprint; for the most part you shouldn’t pay more for green hosting until you are sure that it is true to its name.