Strategies for making your website "green"
There are a great many things turning "green" or "eco friendly" these days and in an effort to take part in this earth friendly attitude, many websites are going "green."
Web Hosting Options
There are quite a few web-hosting providers that using natural energy sources such as solar and wind energy. These environmentally conscious providers can help you take the first step in having a "green" website. www.aiso.net is a web-hosting provider that gets its energy from solar power. www.dishost.com is a hosting provider that gets power from wind energy.
Energy Saving Ideas
If you work from home you can also green the amount of electricity your home office uses in an effort to maintain an earth friendly website. You can start by replacing the light bulbs in your home office with compact fluorescent bulbs. Keep any devices that you are not currently using turned off to avoid using excessive amounts of energy.
If you do a lot of your work off of a laptop computer you could purchase a portable solar charger. Most solar chargers are quite small and quite easy to take with you if needed. www.treehugger.com is an excellent source of information about portable solar chargers.
You can also find energy saving products on amazon here.
Carbon Credits
If it is not feasible for you to rely totally on natural energy for you website you could purchase carbon credits for your energy use. Carbon credits are used in order to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that a business produces each month.
If you were to go over your allotted amount of carbon dioxide that you are able to produce you may purchase carbon credits from another business. If you have produced less then the monthly quota, you have the option to sell your carbon credits.
Wikipedia has an understandable explanation of carbon credits here.
Some places where you 'walk the walk:
http://www.carbonfootprint.com
http://www.carbonplanet.com
http://www.carbonbalanced.org
Becoming Printer Friendly
You could also make your website printer friendly in an effort to have a more ecologically minded online presence. This can be done by changing a lot of the fonts to black and white.
This can help save your visitors' ink when they are printing out pages of your website. Additionally try and limit detailed advertisements and pictures this can help save your website visitors' ink as well.
Recycling Equipment
Making sure your old computer equipment, cell, printer, etc is properly recycled is something that you can do in your effort to run a green website. If computer parts are not properly recycled, their components can do a lot of damage to the environment.
It will take some time and effort on your part but with that hard work will come the satisfaction of knowing that your website is doing it's part to conserve the earth's precious resources.
Vic Carrara
www.onlyforprofit.com
Vic Carrara owns and writes for www.onlyforprofit.com, helping entrepreneurs and small business owners build more profitable websites.
Copyright 2007 - Vic Carrara. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Reprint Rights: You may reprint this article as long as you leave all of the links active, do not edit the article in any way, give author name credit and send a link of where you are publishing this article to me here.
Here are some more 'green powered' web hosting services:
http://www.aiso.net
http://www.earthsite.net
http://www.ecologicalhosting.com
http://www.ecosky.com
http://www.elfon.com
http://www.ethicalhost.ca
http://www.globalforum.net/green.htm
http://www.gogreenhosting.com
http://www.greenhosting.org
http://www.greenwebhost.net
http://www.HostItGreen.com
http://www.locomotivemedia.com
http://www.planetmind.net
http://www.solardatacenters.com
http://www.spinhost.ca
http://www.sustainablehosting.com
http://www.sustainablewebsites.com
http://www.thinkhost.com
http://www.vitalbodies.com
http://www.webctel.com/solar.htm
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