Green & Eco-Friendly Hosting

The above quote is from a major industrialist and was said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The WEF is an organization where governments and large corporations come together to discuss social issues. Foremost now, is the issue of climate change.

Though SingleHop isn't a major conglomerate, we feel a genuine responsibility to do our part in reducing power usage and greenhouse gases.

Though this may seem an odd concern for a web hosting company, it is a truly significant environmental issue. An EPA report on data centers, presented to the U.S. Congress in 2006 presented both hopeful and disturbing figures. In 2006, data centers in the United States alone used 60 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity. That is 1.5% of all US electricity consumption. They use more electricity than the state of Mississippi, as well as 19 other states , and use a similar amount of energy used by approximately 5.8 million combined US households (5% of US housing stock).

Data center energy usage doubled from the year 2000-2006. It is now predicted that energy usage for data centers will double again to 100 billion kilowatt-hours, costing $7.4 billion annually. Even more distressing, is that the peak load on the present power grid for data center is approximately 7 gigawatts, equaling 15 baseload power plants. If the current trend continues, demand will rise to 12GW by 2011 requiring an additional 10 power plants, meaning that in the next five years, possibly 90% of companies will have service interruptions due to power grid overloads.

We at SingleHop have anticipated and are doing our part to reverse this trend. Our policies are already in line with EPA suggestions for improving energy usage in hosting companies. We have always purchased only power efficient hardware. While the EPA cites a typical server having a processor requiring 80 watts at peak power, our dual processor D-L5310 uses only 40 watts. Also, the EPA states that an average rack of servers uses around 20kW of power. Ours average around 12.6 kW. Our servers are all low-voltage and power efficient, reducing our carbon footprint. Also, cooling, on average, accounts for 50% of electricity usage in data centers. Hot spots in data centers can disrupt service. Our data center is engineered in a cold aisle/hot aisle configuration, which results in the need for less cooling and virtually eliminates hot spots. Also important to note, is that our power efficiency is key to our service uptime guarantee. By our strategic engineering of our data center and our use of low voltage servers, our lower energy usage prevents power overload and service interruptions. This is absolutely vital. Data centers are an integral part of our modern society in the digital age. Data centers and dedicated servers are now used to store medical records, governmental records, and are an important feature of many businesses. Our power outage prevention measures ensure that these records are always accessible, allowing public services and businesses to function more efficiently and effectively.

Furthermore, our servers are largely lead free, halogen free, and mercury free, reducing water contamination, chemical and solid wastes, and emissions, both from us and during the production of these servers. We even do the little things that still make a difference, like recycle all parts that are disposed of and recycle our boxes and garbage.





But, most importantly, we are a committed member and sponsor of the Green Grid (http://www.thegreengrid.org), a global consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers. A commitment that many of our competitors cannot claim.

As we grow as a company, our commitment to green technology will continue. We are happy to be able to share our environmental ideals with our customers and our belief in the need for social and environmental consciousness in the IT industry.