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Is Green Web Hosting The Future of The Web? Count On It

Is Green Web Hosting The Future of The Web? Count On It. Internet Future: Green Web Hosting

The world wide web runs on electricity, though we don’t usually think about it. But the fact is, without electricity you wouldn’t be reading this. You’d hunker down in front of the fireplace and read the newspaper by the dim light of a lamp fueled by whale oil. Sound like fun?

It wasn’t. It was actually pretty boring compared to today’s instant information available only on the W3. If it happens any where – from Teheran to Terre Haute, it spreads virally across the digital landscape in seconds. That news bit also gobbles up electricity like nobody’s business.

So, is green hosting the wave of the future web? Yes. And if you aren’t riding the crest of that wave, you’ll be left behind in the digital dust. An energy munching web site is sooo “last millennium.”

The Ever Expanding World Wide Web

Some facts about green hosting:

There are more than 125 million web sites on line today.
Each day, 6,000 new web sites launch, carrying with them the dreams and visions of web-preneurs looking to become the next Amazon.
Each web site sits on a server that requires electricity to run it and cool it. That requires a lot of electricity.
The electricity bill for a successful web host would make a grown man cry. It’s HUGE. Many web hosts pay thousands of dollars monthly to keep their servers juiced.
The consumption of electricity used by web hosts doubled in just five years.
With the advent of Web 2.0 features like videos, VoIP, streaming TV and other “must-haves,” the web will only expand the demand for more and more electricity.
Experts suggest that energy consumption by web hosts will continue to double every five years and studies show these web pros are actually being conservative. Some “green” bloggers suggest the amount of electricity consumed by web hosts will double every 30 months.
Energy consumption to power the W3 grows exponentially, doubling then quadrupling and so on. The demand for power from web hosts will increase at a phenomenal rate.
As the world wide web grows in both size and features, web site owners will require increasing amounts of bandwidth to avoid long download times.

What Are Web Hosts and Why Do They Gobble Up Energy?

Conduct a Google search of web hosts and see what pops up.

You’ll get 149,000,000 search results for web hosts. Now, not all of these SERP links are for actual web hosts. Some are for reviewing sites (that use web hosts), blogs about web hosts (that use a web host to get their blogs out to the masses) and even SERPs links to sellers, resellers and re-re-sellers of hosting services.

Hosting is a commodity on the web. You or I can buy space from a web host and open up our own hosting company. The mother host provides all the tools and support you need to build your own hosting company in the basement office. (The one that floods occasionally. Ooops.)

A web host can be a kid down the street or it can be a huge, physical plant with chipheads tending to racks of servers, customer support taking calls from subscribers and office people tending to routine business matters – like paying the electric company.

What’s a server? Well, in simplest terms, a server is not much more than a humongous hard drive in a box. Your web site (or future web site) resides on one of these server hard drives, along with hundreds of other web sites. Today, server disk space is measured in terabytes.

What’s a terabyte? A measurement of bits and bytes on steroids. A terabyte is the equivalent of 1,000 gigabytes. More dramatically, a terabyte equals 1,000,000,000,000 bytes or 10 to the 12th power of bytes.

That brand new computer you just bought MIGHT have a 500 gigabyte hard drive. A server has dozens of terabytes of storage. It also has tons of RAM (128 gigabytes of RAM isn’t unusual) so that the server can deliver the bandwidth required for fast downloads of all the sites stored on that server.

In other words, web hosting companies consume a lot of electricity with rack upon rack of servers all sucking up electricity from the grid.

Facebook, alone, employs 30,000 servers as of October, 2009 and that number grows daily as more and more of us connect through this social media site. Amazon employs thousands of servers. Microsoft, Verizon and all of your other favorite sites employ thousands of servers strung together in arrays,

In other words, there are millions of servers storing terabytes of information available to you on the W3. Yep, even your little blog gobbles up electricity.

Green Hosting

So, even though we may not think about energy consumption when we stake a claim to some digital real estate, build and launch web site, we are adding to the demand for more and more electricity.

Now, along comes green hosting – hosting companies that employ “green” technology to lower the demand for electricity generated by coal- and gas-fired electricity generation plants. These businesses recognize that green hosting is inevitable as energy costs rise and we continue to pump tons of air-borne pollutants into the atmosphere every day.

Things ain’t going to get better, folks, unless our corporate culture does an about face and stops drawing down available energy. Major cities, like Los Angeles and Phoenix, already experience rolling blackouts as parts of the energy grid are shut down for a while. New York City broadcasts “please turn off your air conditioners” on the hottest summer days and brown-outs are almost routine.

Green hosting is leading the way in how U.S. businesses conduct on-line business by employing green sources of energy to power their servers.

A green host doesn’t add to the demand for more electricity from traditional sources. Instead, these far-sighted companies employ new technology – solar power, wind power, deep core earth energy, hydro-electric (where available) and bio-fuels that can be regenerated with another harvest of corn.

But there’s a lot more to web hosting than just storing web sites on gigantic hard drives. It’s not just about ROM. It’s also about RAM, which translates into the speed at which your web site interacts with site visitors. It better be fast. Studies reveal that 90% of us will sit through a 10-second download while only 10% will sit through a 30-second download. We’ve become that impatient.

From a site owner’s perspective, that stat translates into a loss of 80% of your prospects in that 20-second download window. So you want more RAM, more bandwidth and unfettered access to the server’s CPU and other shared assets – server parts you share with other sites.

Hosts employ the latest in fiber optic technology, they boost RAM and deliver quick downloads even quicker. Green web hosts do this without further straining the energy system that we rely on to log on, watch TV and cook dinner by using non-traditional resources to power up your web site whenever a site visitor stops by.

Cool It

In addition to delivering more bandwidth to you and your site visitors, and easier access to the server’s CPU, servers need to be cooled.

Even your PC pumps out a lot of heat and heat is the enemy of all those circuit boards, CPUs and other electronics inside the box. Now multiply that by thousands – tens of thousands of servers all humming along pumping out heat. To keep these servers happy, they need to be cooled.

Traditional hosts add to the demand for more energy by cooling servers with cold air. The server room in a hosting company is kept cool – so cool you could probably store sides of beef in there if the racks of servers didn’t take up so much space. That cooling requires energy and plenty of it.

Green hosts, once again, employ state-of-the-art tech to cool those thousands of servers. They use cold water, flushed through a water-tight system, to cool the server room, lessening the demand for more and more cold air from the local coal-burning energy plant.

Make a Statement: We’re Green

Getting a little recognition on the W3 is hard, even in a niche market (especially in a niche market). You have less than 10 seconds to convince a site visitor to stick around long enough to learn about the quality of your services, your products or your message. Web surfers are jagged out on information overload. If they don’t see what they want to see on your home page or a landing page, they bounce.

So, making a statement about your corporate culture and your business’ core values has to happen in the blink of an eye. Visitors will never even see the “About Us” page if you don’t create a good impression – in 10 seconds!

An emblem or banner proclaiming that you employ green hosting makes an immediate statement about your on-line business. It says you care about the environment. It says you care about the future of the planet and our children and grandchildren who will populate Earth 25, 50 or 100 years from now.

That “green” badge of honor also bestows a cache of cutting edge tech-iness. You get it. Your on-line business uses green hosting because you recognize the importance of this fledging movement.

There aren’t a lot of green hosts even today. However, more hosts will soon recognize that green is the only way to go. And those few green hosts out there now?

They’re making a statement about their business culture – a statement that passes on to your business when you display a green host emblem or banner.

Who said it isn’t easy being green? Today, green hosting makes a statement about you and your business – a positive statement.

And with less than 10 seconds to make a good first impression, that “green” host emblem goes a long, long way in making the right statement quickly.

Yep, we get it. We’re green. Stick around and learn more.

Future of Ecommerce

A move that changed the way people went about shopping online, ecommerce solutions have come a long way since then. Right from the time when the dot com bubble burst, the web saw constant changes and revelations that started affecting our daily lives. One of them was ecommerce solutions that helped customers across the globe purchase their favourite products online without any hesitations or apprehensions. An initiative that was taken by web gurus for strictly business purposes, ecommerce has become a juggernaut that gets used daily by millions of users across the globe for purchase and other transactions. The terminology has become an industry and many wonder whether ecommerce would be able to sustain this sudden business explosion or not.

Ecommerce websites made by Offshore Outsourcing Company and web design India companies became the easiest way to shop. The online shops are available throughout day and night and also offer good discounts. Offshore outsourcing India service providers making these websites develop them in a way that they are well equipped to handle purchases of all types and also have provisions of accepting payments through cards. Business has been made easier and so have purchases become. The marketing space that it provides has become a pedestal for many companies to thrive and promote products. But the golden question still remains, where does ecommerce go from here?

The fact is, ecommerce is here to stay and progress. Ecommerce websites are helping organizations to make money and there is no reason why these enterprises will close their flourishing online jobs and look for something else. Offshore web development companies and web design India service providers are getting huge projects where enterprises are getting ecommerce solutions on their websites to register exponential sales. These solutions have taken organizations out of the dumps and have put them on the path to register reasonable sales. Offshore outsourcing India companies providing these ecommerce solutions have helped enterprises in talking the route to doing good business and subsequently, ecommerce is only going to grow from here.

Since ecommerce has gone onto become a colossus that cannot be subdued or packed into exile, there is no way that its growth would stop. The formula has become a globally acclaimed hit and the services are being sought after everywhere. Enterprises trying to establish a global presence are hiring ecommerce solutions so that consumers visiting their website get good facilities to make purchases on it and turn it into a revenue generating machine. Ecommerce also promises hope and positivity to all those enterprises not doing that well by adding a lot of presence to them on the web and styling them in such a way that they look like websites genuinely made to register sales.

More or less, ecommerce has brought in a lot of hope into the web world. It continues to flourish and along with it flourishes the idea of websites selling their products quite effectively and growing into enterprises, a possibility that might have not come true had ecommerce services not been there.

Future of Online Business Development

Everybody looks for the efficient and effective online business process. Yet, somewhere down the line everyone is concerned about the future of internet business development. It is sure that the upcoming online business era is under the shed of sheer competition. However, experts and analysts are coming up with new online strategy so that online business developers can foresee profitable outcomes.

It is only through the internet business that one think of fading borders, when it comes selling their products to the larger mass. Even the most popular business tycoons have realized that E-Business is the massive growth phase. This is a reason that most of traditional business holders are switching or integrating their business with the electric platform. Thus, the debate of the E-Business seems stronger and more flourishing in the coming years. For people are not so good with internet business development can look up to the internet experts. They will help you with creating, developing, and growing your business on the internet.

However, you must be able to choose your business experts deliberately so that you get the right advice and can precisely draw your ideas into reality. The future proof online business development carries with more easy access of the internet services. Services such as Mobile-ready, social network savvy, useful content can be great managed by online experts and increase your electronic economy.

Future of E-Business development is that it helps in integrating business with the existing business processes and workflows. Moreover, you can select the latest proven Internet technologies to add much to your existing business. Thus, online successes will increased profit steams for your business.

Here go a few commendable steps for the development of online business

Brand Development and Consulting: the online marketers take care of your business at the initial stage and secure your tag line for the new business. Right from the business name to the domain name and social media extensions, everything can be a taken care of.
Logo, Corporate brand, website Design and brand design on social Media: this is a vital section of your online business development. Including impressive graphic designs, the professional SEO and web designers ensures your website to have a correct professional look and feel. Further, it should mark strong presence on the social media through potential avenues.
Marketing and Advertising through Internet Marketing: it is not that only exclusive look works for your website. After your website gets ready, you have to start immense awareness for its proper growth. You can do this through SERP, SEO, Social Media, Forums, Business Directories, PPC, Email, Telemarketing and traditional media. If you have a small business then key is the immediate cash flow which can targeted through internet marketing.
Follow on support: after you business gets the up thrust, it is essential to keep it in a moving shape. This also makes a point that you must constantly strive for the new market positions.

Thus, online business development is reaching is all time acme currently, moreover, it going to in the same position for 10 decades.

Role of a Web Development Company in Shaping the Future of Your Business

Every business exists to achieve some goals and realize their objectives. For some, physical presence does the trick while for others, online remains the best place to find prospects. We know the web is growing at a rapid rate and in such a scenario, no enterprise can ignore the digital world and its amazing benefits. However, it takes a quality website to take the business online and put it in the league of industry leaders. The website has to be designed and developed keeping in mind the changing tastes and preferences of users of modern age.

Further, the website will be a link between your business and its prospects as it conveys information and draws attention. Its sole purpose is to help promote products, services and ethos of the business to a bigger and wider market. More importantly, the website your business plans to get created has to be made to cater to the users by enriching, informing and enlightening them at every stage of the way. Quite clearly, the task at hand is not easy particularly when you aim to leverage the ever-growing potential of the web and shape the future of the business.

You will certainly need to find an experienced and skilled company with a proven track record of creating web-enabled solutions such as apps, websites and portals etc. The company has to be familiar with the latest trends and techniques of the web world and have the resources to utilize the acquired knowledge in a true sense. Similarly, it must know about the features and functionalities needed in a website to perform well over the internet. So, it makes sense for you to first search, then analyse the options at hand before choosing the right company for your web project.

In addition, the website in question should be user and search engine-friendly so that accessing information from it remains smooth and easy for users. What’s more, it has to come fitted with simple navigation options and buttons to let visitors reach from one point to another in a hassle-free manner. There must be technical finesse in the site but not at the cost of creating confusion for visitors. Responsive design should be used so that the resultant website can perform consistently across devices and operating systems. The design should be in sync with the changing norms of the web market while mobile-friendliness has to be kept in mind.

More so, high-quality business websites are known to convey information and ideas in an easy manner, so yours one must consider this aspect as well to catch the attention of more prospects on the web. Similarly, the website has to be designed as per SEO standards so that superior visibility remains a matter of fact. In fact, compatibility with web browsers can’t be ignored else the reach and impact of the website might at best be limited. Proper web optimization is something no website can ignore and you should also keep this is mind to gain great results on the visibility front.

In overall, it’s a good decision to take your business online and reap benefits that are multiplying by the minute. For that to happen, you must avail the services and expertise of a top web development company and realize the true potential of the business. You should know the role played by a skilled company in regard to your website’s performance in the digital world, so the hiring must be correct. Only then can you expect the site to reach to more users, take the business essence forward in a desired manner and bring home advantages galore.

New Energy Future – We Need to Turn More Green Business Ideas Into Action

The way forward lies in green investment. No, I’m not talking about dollars, though that too will follow inevitably. I’m talking about greening your small business. And the many successful entrepreneurs who have managed to build sustainable businesses without sacrificing ethics or the environment.

The Obama government has set apart billions of dollars to encourage green business ideas and initiatives. Various finance sources such as tax credits, loans and grants are available to fund green buildings and energy efficient ventures at national, state and local levels. Homeowners, businesses, non-profit organizations and government organizations can take advantage of these opportunities to convert their green ideas into action.

Alternative renewable energy sources harness natural resources. Solar energy, wind farms, biogas digestion, rain water, biomass briquettes, helioculture are some examples of alternative renewable energy. Solar panels and installers are being used by many businesses, schools and homes to generate heat and electricity.

Top companies of various industries are taking responsibility to reduce their ecological footprint by slashing greenhouse gas emissions. Though saving money and reducing risks are the main incentives driving these initiatives, every effort is crucial in combating climate change. Green consulting agencies help businesses green their premises and inculcate green business practices amongst its employees. Energy efficient products conserve energy and reduce bills for consumers.

Businesses should support green initiatives with the necessary infrastructure and processes. Energy-efficient computers, monitors, printers, fax machines, scanners, copiers and multi-function devices that automatically power down during extended inactivity save 50% energy or more. Laptops are much more energy efficient than desktops. Consider upgrading your employees to laptops.

Taking business operations online reduces usage of paper and printing ink. Sending customers online receipts of sales instead of paper is another step. Online operations also improve business efficiency as data can be managed in a better way. Businesses should use recycled products wherever possible – paper, packages, toilet paper, etc. Wastage of water should be minimized by installing water saving devices in bathrooms and cafeteria. Energy efficient vending machines are equipped with refrigeration and lighting controls and save up to 30% energy. The key is to save wherever and whenever possible.

Where there is a will, there is a way. Nothing rings truer when one sees the amazingly innovative small green businesses sprouting across the globe. Typical examples are BTTRventures – a 100% sustainable urban mushroom farm that utilizes recycled coffee grounds from Peet’s Coffee & Tea, founded in Berkeley, CA by two 2009 grads; Turning Point Brewery – Canada’s first sustainable brewery; GRID Alternatives – provides renewable energy and energy efficiency services to low-income homeowners and community members.

There is never a better time than now. While businesses are doing their part to conserve the ecological system, it is also every individual’s moral responsibility to build a safe and healthy future for the next generation. By respecting our environment and following green practices at home and office, we pass on the right education to our children. Reduce, reuse and recycle – this is the mantra we all need to incorporate into our lifestyles.