What To Look For in Green Web Hosting

Before you choose a web hosting company, have you done your research on what’s available?

Have you considered the impact of this seemingly simple decision in the long run?

Instead of relying on somebody else telling you what you need, now is the good time to check if you know what you need from your web hosting.

Ready? Let’s get started.

To be honest, the same principles apply as in any hosting with only one, but very big, difference.

What To Look For in Green Web Hosting?

Below are the main things to consider before committing to a green web hosting company.

1. Are they really a Green Web Host?

Hosting companies have an enormous impact on the environment. Their data servers use massive amounts of electricity to maintain that optimal 100% uptime and to keep cool.

Green Web Hosting is eco-friendly hosting. These types of hosts usually use renewable energy. For example, the hosting company GreenGeeks puts back into the grid three times the amount of energy its servers manage to consume. So it not only wipes out your digitally produced carbon footprint but also negates the carbon footprint from hosting two additional companies of equivalent size. According to Sustainable Business Toolkit’s detailed review of GreenGeeks hosting they also use energy efficient hardware in eco-data centres.

Make sure you check with your proposed host how they power their servers. Green hosts should be able to say they purchase electricity from renewable energy suppliers.

Don’t forget that, as a business, you will benefit from being able to publish online that you power your website through renewable energy.

2. Is the server reliable?

When it comes to service, your web hosting company is definitely one supplier whom you need working 24×7. Come to Christmas, hurricane or Armageddon – they need to be ready to help you at any moment.

But apart from that you also need them to demonstrate that they really have a powerful server and provide a stable network with over 99% uptime score.

So don’t hesitate to use that chat window and ask away!

3. How much is your signup cost? What about your renewal cost?

It is an unspoken rule of the hosting giants to charge less on sign up and then charge much more on the renewal of the contract.

So there is pretty much no way to avoid that extra cost.

But you need to know how much it will be so that you compare companies correctly and don’t go with the lowest signup cost only to end up paying quadruple for renewal.

4. Refund Policy

Before getting your credit card out, ask yourself these two important questions:

• Is there a refund policy after the trial?
• Are there any cancellation charges?

This probably goes without saying, but hosting isn’t like any other purchase online.

This will be a long-term commitment and as it will host your website, it will be one hard to abandon as it is. So might as well try to minimise the pain of parting.

So try to get the answers to these questions first and avoid hosting companies that charge very high cancellation fees during trial periods. At all costs.

5. Can you upgrade your server?

If you aren’t sure about your web needs just yet, you will probably opt for shared hosting. These are quite powerful now, although it does sound a bit like a shared house ownership – who really owns it then?

But if you know that your website will grow massively – by massively we mean over 50 thousand unique visitors per month – after a few years, then you could look to upgrade your web host to a dedicated server.

This will provide your site with much more storage, processing power, memory, and additional security features.

6. Check how user-friendly the control panel is

We can’t stress enough how important a simple and user-friendly control panel is. But it also needs to have quite a lot of functionality.

There are different types of control panels, with cPanel being the simplest to navigate, usually. Although, this is a personal preference. There are also V-Decks, Plesks, a third party control panel and many other formats.

The rule of thumb is:

As long as you find that you can do basic server changes without involving the IT help desk, you are good to go.

7. Will you need any more domains?

Having many domains is pretty common nowadays.

According to a Web Hosting Talk survey, 80% of the respondents own more than 5 domains with more than 20% owning more than 50,

Why? Because it pays to do so in the long run and because they are very cheap to own anyway.

Most hosting companies these days will allow extra room for additional domains through allocating more space.

Even shared accounts allow about 20 extra domains. But it pays to check the domain capacity before committing.

Wrapping Up

I hope you made use of our Green Web Hosting 2017, didn’t you?

In case you have any doubts regarding this, don’t forget to leave a comment below. I will reach out to you at the earliest.

Share What To Look For in Green Web Hosting with your friends. Let them get an idea about green web hosting and their features.