Harbor Data Systems has teamed up with GreenGeeks, a super-eco-friendly web hosting provider, to bring you the most reliable, stable, and eco-conscious hosting available. And you get your hosting and domain for free when you choose our design and development services.

Complete business and personal websites starting at only $995 include:

• 2 years hosting (2gigs hosting space, unlimited bandwidth, 300% green) and a free domain name or existing domain transfer
• Web-based product catalog with online ordering, so customers can shop with you from the comfort of their own homes!
• Unlimited free email hosting (your own @websitename.com)
• Email setup (we’ll help you connect Outlook, your mobile phones, or Thunderbird to your email account)
• SEO and internet marketing advice. We’ll help get your web-presence started, too!
• Advertising assessment. We’ll show you the ropes of geographically-targeted advertising online!
• 6 custom pages, more upon request!

Below is some information that GreenGeeks has provided us regarding how they are eco-friendly:

It’s important to choose an eco-friendly web host. Many people are surprised when we tell them that the internet is not green and that by no means is the web hosting industry eco-friendly. In fact studies show that by 2005 the web hosting industry used as much energy to power their servers as the equivalent of 14 major power plants. Studies have shown that by the year 2020 that the web hosting industry will be as big of a polluter as the airline industry. Click here to read the third party analysis.

In addition to changing the web hosting industry’s environmental impact we have an even greater strategy which we believe will help to spread a greater eco-friendly consciousness, please read about GreenGeeks Green Mission.

It is important that this industry becomes green and GreenGeeks is the world’s most eco-friendly web hosting company. We would like for you to choose a certified green, eco-friendly web hosting company to host your web site. We hope that you will choose to go green with your web site, please allow us to tell you why we feel we are the best option.

Green Power Recognition.
GreenGeeks works with the Bonneville Environmental Foundation to buy wind energy credits to offset our energy consumption and to put more energy back into the grid which was produced by wind power technology. In 2009 GreenGeeks was invited to join the US. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Green Power Partner program.

How are we green?
We pull energy from the grid just like every web hosting company. We must pull energy from the grid in order to make sure that we have a constant power flow for our servers and to make sure the servers would not be interrupted by a lack of power. Unfortunately much of the power that flows through our grid today was produced by polluting technologies like fossil fuels.

In order to compensate for the polluting 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.

Other ways we are green.
In addition to purchasing wind energy credits, we work on all of our servers and reconfigure them so that they run more efficiently using less energy and run cooler. What this means is less energy consumption on the server as well as less energy needed to cool the server. (Co-location data centers are constantly cooled [24x7x365] by enormous cooling fans which use a tremendous amount of energy). These attentions to detail on the servers allow us to be more energy efficient in our data centers, but we don’t stop there.

• Use only what’s needed.
  • We are 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.

• Telecommuting
  • Our hosting also searches for top notch personnel and sometimes we find talented and skilled service personnel who are not located near our offices. Rather than try to relocate these talented employees we allow them to telecommute from home or a shared office near them. This allows some of our employees to not have to commute to work saving money and carbon emissions on gas consumption for their cars.

There are many more minor ways that we are eco-conscious and we’d love to hear your thoughts on how we are green, how we may improve and also how your own organization is going green. Please email us at support@harbordatasystems.com with any comments, questions or suggestions.

Conclusion – Our Green Eco-Friendly Hosting
Our commitment to going green extends beyond our own company and the customers we serve. We look at the direction of the web hosting industry and we saw that unless we started to turn the tide sooner rather than later that our industry was headed for an environmental calamity. In addition we saw secondary benefits to promoting green energy hosting through the web hosting community and how individual web sites could help to promote a more eco friendly consciousness through the web.

We sincerely hope that you will choose a certified green web hosting provider, even if you do not choose to host your site with Harbor Data Systems and GreenGeeks.