When it comes to fighting global warming, here’s what most people will do: cut down air conditioner usage, reduce plastic bags usages, use a bicycle, use recycled papers, and split your garbage into seperate recycle bins.

What about web hosting?

I bet majority of us have not thought about getting a ‘green’ host when it comes to web hosting. In fact, little had been told – most of us do not link global warming with web hosting at all.

However, do you know about 3~4% of the electricity used in this world is consumed by date centers? The IT sector has a huge climate impact.

If you’re one of the four and a half million registered users of Second Life, consider this: the average Second Life avatar consumes 1,752 kWh of electricity per year, or about two thirds that of an actual person (globally averaged). One server alone has roughly the same climate impact as a 15mpg SUV!

Seeing our planet needs a hand desperately, Hostgator has gone green by working out series of program (with the help of Integrated Ecosystem Market Services) to reduce their IT emissions.

What had Hostgator achieved?

As the impact of this program, Hostgator is now using renewable energy (wind power) to cool and power their servers.They had purchased RECs (translate it to wind power capacity) for 130% of the elctricity used to maintain both their shared and reseller servers.

What does this mean to you?

Switching to Hostgator, or picking up Hostgator as your web host means that you care about your environment. By switching from another web host (that’s not using recycle power), you simply reduce your personal carbon footprint greatly.

Want more readings?

Wish to know how Hostgator did it? Check out their latest blogpost about the whole go-green program: What’s lean, mean, and now green.