Does "The Planet" have windmill powered servers?

Is this a trick question, Blue?

No. I'm actually curious about this.

I can only presume you mean the company and not "does there exist a server on the planet of which is powered by windmill?". For the former Id hazard no, for the latter I can only imagine the support responses... as practically...hmm...

Correct. I am wondering if there are actual servers at 'The Planet' data center that are 100% wind powered.

Hey, that was pretty creative .. made me smile.

The last time I was in talks with them, they did not have windmill powered setups. They were looking into the same type setup that Hostgator was doing in that they were looking to invest in some windmill farms and help offset energy costs, and then also purchasing REC (Renewable Energy Credits), however the physical power that comes to their servers is not directly from a windmill source.

This was information being passed around by their upper management about 2 years ago, however I've never heard any official notice that they had succeeded in securing REC's.

I am very familiar with them and I have not heard of any windmill powered data centers either.

Thanks. Just curious.

I teach a course in sustainability and part of the course involves exposing misleading statements and sometimes outright lies told by companies in order to appear to be "Green" when it comes to environmental issues.

I see these days a lot of hosting companies making green claims and even claims of 100% wind powered servers.
The majority of these hosts' sites seem to resolve back to The Planet.

Seems odd to me that would be the case if The Planet doesn't even offer such a thing.

Yeah, there's very few centers that are 100% anything these days. One of the big things that companies are doing however in order to get to claim their "GREEN" status is that they're buying those Carbon Credit Offsets and Renewable Energy Credits.

I've seen a number of hosting companies claiming "green" just because they turn off the lights at night, and they're buying newer machines which use less power and put out less heat etc - thus the AC bill is lower. This, in my book, is not GREEN. It's friendly, but not really what others consider as GREEN. By the same token, I've seen hosts that plant trees for each new customer they get (we do that too from time to time) however I'd not claim GREEN in our hosting company for doing something like that.

But you're right, too many are using buzz words and not really following through on it.

It's almost always about paying to put wind generated energy back in the grid, and it goes true not just for The Planet based hosts. There aren't all that many data centers to choose from that don't rely on burning fuel to power the servers.

I agree, I would not feel "green" doing any of that. I would feel some degrees greener though. It is very hard to be absolutely green though. It would probably mean not using lots of things, like say mercury, in any of the bits and pieces that you use, or in their manufacturing process, nor use non renewable energy in that same process.

Does that mean we should ban claims of "eco" and "green"? IMHO, these labels are here to stay, and they're not a bad thing, as long as they're properly explained and, of course, what is claimed is actually true. If you claim to be planting trees, you should do it, and make sure that the company you're paying to do it for you, is not just stealing the money.

I definitely agree that the labels are here to stay, and for that matter, many places use it correctly (and define what they mean when they say "green" or "eco friendly". I guess it's like everything else in the world, people jump on the bandwagon and try to exploit in any way possible.

I do the "race for the cure" and run the runs etc, and have often thought of doing a campaign with the hosting end of things and donating a portion of new sales to the group etc, however I've always had the thought in the back of my mind that if I put up the Pink Ribbon on the site, I'm somewhat exploiting a good cause for my own benefit (more customers).

It can be a tough decision deciding to post notices about donations to charities etc (Hatti was another exploit too many people jumped on board with). I don't think that by posting a pink ribbon that it would encourage people to sign up, but maybe it would.

Anyway, I've gone off on a tangent that probably deserves it's own thread

I have no issue with using charity events to generate business.
It's a win/win situation. You get more clients and the charity gets more money.

My problem is with the use of these things and not actually following through.
It's too easy for some less than scrupulous host to advertise green or to claim to make donations to charities but there is no real way of authenticating it.

Whether or not carbon offsets are purchased or trees are planted, again very hard to verify, the claim that servers are 100% wind powered seems like a dishonest one.

Dell had a promotion where they planted a tree for every computer/server sold. I know some hosting providers used this as their way of planting a tree. If they sold a server, they would be using a server that was bought from Dell, and Dell planted a tree for them -- they weren't really planting a tree themselves, but a tree was planted as a result of the server order.

While The Planet doesn't have wind powered DCs, they do implement best green practices for their facilities.

http://blog.theplanet.com/2009/10/02...-data-centers/ -- Just an example of some of the things they do.