Top Green Web Hosting Reviewed

DreamHost - A green host?

DreamHost are a very well known web site host - particularly for their feature packed and cheap service. For less than $6 per month they’ll give you 500GB of space and 5TB of transfer plus a whole heap of the usual features and some unusual ones.They also have recently gone green by purchasing carbon credits to offset their emissions.

DreamHost Going Green

To go green they went the whole hog. First, they calculated the impact of every single aspect of the DreamHost company. That includes, the paper in their offices, the gas in their cars and, of course, the electricity powering their webservers. All of this added up quickly and ended up being equivalent to 545 average sized homes!

Rather than just buy some carbon credits, DreamHost then went and tried reduce, reuse and recycle. They found ways to save energy by turning off their lights, reducing car use, reusing paper that was only printed on one side and other clever energy saving activities.

Once they had cut down their emissions to the very bare minimum for a hosting company they then went out to see how to make their electricity supply clean and green. Because none of their direct suppliers had green options they’ve opted to invest in ‘Emission Reduction Credits’ - in other words carbon credits - to offset their impact. They’ve gone with The Green Office who sell them RECs for their electricity CO2 emissions and non-electricity emissions. As you can see from that link above, they’re neutralising tons of CO2 every year. But how green are they?

DreamHost’s Carbon Credits

Proper use of carbon credits, however, can be fraught with difficult, see our write-up here. How green is the option that Dreamhost has chosen?

Well, DreamHost buy RECs from The Green Office. The Green Office don’t actually produce any RECs themselves, nor are they officially certified by any organisation - they are like a middleman who help connect businesses to green products and services. The RECs the Green Office sells come from The Bonneville Environmental Foundation - Green Tags program (for emissions from electricity generation) and My-Climate Carbon Offsets (for non-electrical emissions).

Bonneville Foundation Green Tags

The Bonneville Foundation carbon credits are certified by Green-E. The Green-E certification program is one of the best and most respected carbon credit programs in America. It was developed by the Centre for Resource Solutions and is a great guarantee that the RECs DreamHost is paying for are actually offsetting their carbon emissions.

The Bonneville Foundation create carbon credits through a variety of electricity generation projects all of which are certified by Green-E. All the RECs produced meet the standards established by the Kyoto Protocol and come from green projects that would have not have existed if not for the Bonneville funding.

My Climate Carbon Offsets

My-Climate Carbon Offsets is a program by Sustainable Travel International that invests in carbon offset projects around the world and sells the resulting RECs. My Climate’s offsets are certified by The CDM Gold Standard - a group started by the WWF, SSN and Helio International - when concerns were arising about the quality of RECs in the market.

The Gold Standard guarantees that the My Climate offsets meet the standard set by the United Nations Clean Development Mechanism and is independently verified by UNFCCC-accredited DOE. It is owned by a group of 40 NGOs, which helps to alleviates worries about bias or corruption.

Conclusion

As you can see DreamHost do have a real commitment to reducing their impact on the environment with their carbon emissions. They didn’t just opt to offset but actually worked out ways to reduce their impact by reducing energy consumption. They are also still working to keep reducing their impact.

As they don’t have direct access to a solar or wind farm, they had to go with some form of carbon offsets or credits. Their choice, while not as direct as possible, seems to be good on the whole. All their RECs are certified by third-party independent organisations with very good credentials, and thus are doing the job of making DreamHost carbon neutral.

DreamHost’s publicly available certificate is a nice touch. But it would also be good to be able to see the exact breakdown of where electricity comes from and what projects are being invested in to offset the impact.

It would be nicer if the connection between the offset and DreamHost was a bit less convoluted, but such is the nature of the carbon offset market that not much can be done about it, without putting up some solar panels!

All in all, TopGreenHosts are happy to recommend DreamHost as a true, green webhost option and encourage them to keep trying to do better.

Special Offer

As a special offer to TopGreenHosts visitors, DreamHost have a number of discount coupon codes you can use if you order a hosting plan from them.

First we’ve got TOPGREENHOSTS. This coupon code will give you $50 off any plan. Just enter it into the box when signing up. That’s the maximum discount possible!

Second, TGHFREEDOMAIN will give you $50 off any plan PLUS a free domain registration for the life of your hosting!

Third, TGH100GB will give you an extra 20% (100GB) of space PLUS $50 off any plan.

Those are some generous deals thanks to DreamHost. If you can think of anything that you’d like in particular in a coupon code, let us know and we’ll try to organise it.

So go check out DreamHost and see if they meet your green hosting needs!

Visitors rating of DreamHost: (1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

 Loading …

What do you think? Please let us know in the comments so we can keep this review up to date and accurate