If you tried accessing 100MileHarvest.com yesterday, you know that the web site was down. As we looked at our options, we realized that we should take advantage of the outage to seek out a host and evaluate them not only on the critical factors of plan offerings, uptime and service, but also on how “green” their business was.
We checked out a few of these web hosting companies, read a number of customer testimonials on third party sites and quickly identified DreamHost as a great choice. Since 2007 they have operated “carbon-neutral.” According to their website:
“DreamHost is carbon neutral. We’ve calculated 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 servers, even the gas in our cars that bring us to the office - leaves behind some kind of soul-sucking residue in the world.
When we learned that running DreamHost generated as much carbon dioxide as 545 average-size homes we realized we had to do something to neutralize our emissions.
With a bit of research we found the most effective approach begins with resource conservation: turning off the lights, reducing travel, printing on both sides of the page. Efforts are being ramped up here daily to do what we do with less. The next step is to use clean, renewable energy. Without the option to put up solar panels or connect with a green power utility for us this means purchasing Renewable Energy Credits. Finally, to neutralize those unavoidable emissions we’ve invested in Emission Reduction Credits (a.k.a. “offsets”) which guarantee our remaining impact is effectively erased. A third-party-certification? Never fear. The credits we use to green our energy consumption and neutralize the rest of our emissions meet the highest standards in the industry. Click to view our up-to-date Certificate of Carbon Neutralization.”
We believe strongly that every dollar is a vote. With every purchase decision we make we can either support sustainability and values-driven businesses, or keep the status quo, which most of us will probably agree is not good enough. This concept has completely changed the way we research, evaluate and purchase products and services, and we are pleased that more people are exercising that economic power. Marketing research firms call us “conscious consumers” or “enlighteneds” – the labels aren’t important, but the growing movement certainly is.
So, 100MileHarvest.com is now being hosted by a DreamHost, a 100% carbon-neutral company. We look forward to seeing more technology and service companies follow their example.
