Web Host Ranking recently had the chance to talk to Trey Gardner of GreenGeeks. GreenGeeks is the winner of the 2010 Best Green Hosting award issued by Web Host Ranking.
Please introduce yourself and what is your role at GreenGeeks?
My name is Trey Gardner and I am the CEO of Green Geeks.
How long has GreenGeeks been in the web hosting industry?
We started Green Geeks in 2006 but we really started to gain traction in the later part of 2007. We are now in our 5th year and doing very well.
What web hosting services does GreenGeeks offer?
Green Geeks is a shared web hosting services provider and we work with small to mid size business web sites as well as individual sites and with resellers. Our hosting services include free domain names for our shared hosting customers, cPanel for our shared and reseller’s control panel with the Fantastico script library which contains all the most popular web hosting scripts. The reseller plans also contain the client exec billing system for them to bill their end user clients.
There are tons of features within our hosting packages and they can all be found on our site in the features area.
What makes GreenGeeks stand out from other web hosts?
I believe that we are a more responsible company than the other web hosts you will find. I believe we work harder to be a better partner for our web hosting clients in our support and services and in being socially responsible. We certainly are more in tune with the people and communities we serve and we are the strongest most eco-friendly advocate in the web hosting industry. We do more to be green than any other host and we do it because we want to lead the entire industry to go green.
How many domains on hosted on your servers?
Currently we have almost 10,000 domains hosted for our shared and reseller servers.
Are your domains on leased or company owned servers?
We work with a company in Chicago, people I have known in the industry for 10+ years and we lease our servers from them. We lease rather than own the servers because it makes the server administration easier on our company and financially it just makes more sense.
For instance we backup our clients’ web sites every night in the event that we have a complete server failure. Should a server have a complete failure we can quickly boot up a new server, restore our clients’ sites to the new server and basically hand the broken server back to our co-location facility and tell them to bill us for the new server and stop billing us for the old server. This arrangement also makes server upgrades much easier and ultimately better for our customers.
Why does GreenGeeks feel so strong about Green Web Hosting?
My goal with respects to trying to move this industry toward becoming more eco friendly stems from love and concern for my children. The reality is that the use of carbon based fuels are unhealthy for the environment. In addition these fossil fuels are finite, at some point we will run out of them and with more markets growing we are going to consume more of these fuels faster than we have before.
We need to invest in creating fuel from sources which are less harmful to the environment and which are renewable sources of energy. If we don’t do this and we get caught without the ability to mass produce renewable energy by the time we have exhausted our fossil fuels the social-economic impact could be equally or greater a catastrophe as the impact that we are doing to the environment.
The web hosting industry is supposed to be as big of a polluter as the airline industry by 2020 and we are here to try to reverse that trend.
What steps does GreenGeeks take to offer Green Web Hosting?
We do alot. We purchase carbon credits (REC’s) to offset our energy consumption and we purchase 3 times the amount of Rec’s for the energy we consumer, so we pull from the grid 1x of energy and put back into the grid 3x of energy having been produced by wind. In addition to this for our bandwidth we purchase REC’s from the European Union (EU) which forces EU industries to have to pay a higher price for their carbon offsets and limits the allowable REC’s for those industries which forces them to have to initiate means to lower their emissions. We also sponsor an event with the American lung Association for their Earth Day celebration.
Any special GreenGeeks promos that you can offer our readers?
Absolutely, we have a coupon for your readers which will give them $30 off our annual or two year shared hosting package and the coupon is “WHRank”
Trey, Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk to Web Host Ranking and discussing the best green web hosting provider, GreenGeeks.
