After many years of faithful service with Australian web host Segpub I’ve now moved this site to another host, GreenGeeks. There are a few reason why I did this.

First of all, the quality of Segpub’s service has degraded lately. My site has loaded slower and slower and at times it has been completely unavailable. While Segpub’s support has not been too bad; they have told me that the reason for the problems has been another client on the same shared server and the usage that client is generating, I’d still prefer that my site is actually online. But coming from a web and application hosting background myself, I can totally understand the challenge with shared servers and clients that are suddenly hogging all the available resources. Also, it’s a risk I’ve agreed to take since I’m only willing to pay for a shared hosting plan, not a dedicated server.

The problem, however, has been that Segpub seems rather reluctant to do anything about the problem. I sent an e-mail asking if they had any plans to deal with the problem on the 19th of November that they have failed to reply. From my experience with other web hosts, I know that the first signs of a troubled company are degrading service quality and slow or non-existent replies to support enquiries. Also, the amount Segpub charges for my hosting package is quite high compared to similar packages offered by other companies. Right now I’m paying roughly $30 USD for a service I can get for a third of that price elsewhere. In other words; it was time to shop around.

The second reason I changed web hosts is that I wanted to go green. Maybe the whole climate crisis thing is just a conspiracy, maybe it’s not. My bet is it’s not, though. Either way, not contributing unnecessarily to polluting the Earth, can’t possibly be a bad thing, can it? I think not.

So, after browsing through a lot of web hosts claiming to be green hosts (you really can’t say if what they are writing on their web sites is actually true), I settled with GreenGeeks. So, how are they green? This is what they write on their web site:

In order to compensate for the power we pull from the grid we purchase wind energy credits for the energy we consume from the grid. In fact we replace, with wind power, 3 times the amount of energy used by our servers so if we pull 1X of power from the grid we purchase enough wind energy credits to put back into the grid 3X of power having been produced by wind power.

I’m not sure how “wind energy credits” work, but I’m imagining that even though they pull power from a power grid full of coal or nuclear* power, they pay someone to build wind power farms somewhere. I guess it’s hard to make sure that the actual electricity being used in the data center is coming from clean wind power.

But GreenGeeks supposedly take the “going green” thing one step further:

Green Geeks is also hyper conscious about our carbon footprint in our offices. We employ rigorous recycling in our offices and we make sure that only legal and essential documents are printed to conserve paper. Any non essential documents which are printed by mistake are returned to the recycle paper area of the office for reuse in any other printing that we need to do. In addition we employ auto lighting control systems to make sure that the lights are not on when no one is in their offices and we make sure we power down all office equipment when not in use.

If all this is actually true, I for one applaud the effort. So far I’m very pleased with GreenGeeks as a web host as well: I ordered their standard hosting package yesterday and moved the site this evening. It’s now faster, available and if you’re seeing this, then your DNS server has picked up the IP address change as well.

If you have your own site, why don’t you go green as well, eh?