Environmentally friendly hosting

We've been approached in the past about looking at environmentally-friendly hosting. We've been long-term partners at Rackspace, and have been pleased with their own carbon offset schemes and environmental policies. Their Green IT award in 2010 was a testament to that.

At Sereno our current thinking is that cloud hosting offers significant environmental advantages over traditional hosting but where clients need robust hosting with the assurance of emergency generators, I don't think we're yet at the stage where we can look seriously at fully solar or wind powered hosts which are now beginning to emerge. We're part of a massive IT industry whose global footprint exceeds that of the airlines and, while we'll often espouse our more obvious green credentials - hey, meet online or take an e-learning course and save thousands of miles of travel (true) - we sometimes forget that we're still sometimes a part of the problem.

At the macro level, companies are investing in greener technologies and energy sources. How you host your site does matter. We want to continue to offer the best level of hosting we can and we want to do this in the most environmenatlly friendly way possible. But the recent Greenpeace report How Dirty is Your Data shows just how difficult it is to really work out and assess what environmental impact cloud hosting and other online services are actually having.

Greater transparency and clarity in this area is vital. We will continue to watch this space keenly.