"Wind-Powered" Web Hosting

An outfit called Sustainable Marketing is touting "Wind powered web hosting" in a press release. This leaves the user with the impression that the company's servers will run on actual wind power, with windmills providing the juice for the data center. Nope. In fact, Sustainable's servers are located in a standard data center at Pegasus Web Technologies in New Jersey. "Because we care, we also purchase renewable energy wind power credits to offset the energy usage of our professional-grade severs," the company says. The site's marketing also touts its use of open source software as a reflection of its enviro-friendly philosophy.

I suppose the notion that a portion of your hosting bill is being reinvested in windmill construction could be appealing to green-thinking consumers. But this is all marketing. A better choice for environmentally conscious sites would be Solar Host, which actually uses solar power to run its operations.

While using open source software might seem novel to folks running Windows XP on their desktop, it hardly amounts to a bold philosophical statement in the world of web hosting, where the combination of Apache running on either Linux or FreeBSD is commonplace, with Apache powering more than 70 percent of all sites.