Green?

Be green to get green…

Do you remember last year when web hosts and data centers were turning ‘green’ 20 a dozen in a bid to “save the environment”? I do – ‘green’ was quite the buzzword at the time and it seemed that anyone who wasn’t turning green was basically turning their back on Mother Earth. Back then I personally questioned whether there was a bandwagon effect taking place, and as they say, if there’s any doubt, there’s no doubt.

At the recent Data Centre World conference in the United Kingdom, data center managers were surveyed and only one in eight cited green issues as their main reason for establishing energy saving strategies. The previous year a substantial one in three attendees suggested green issues were driving their energy efficiency drives. Despite this, over two thirds of those surveyed were actively minimizing power consumption, but now economic issues and driving down costs are at the forefront, not the environment.

It seems that in times of economic hardship people can abandon their good intentions and perhaps they shouldn’t.

A recent 1&1 Internet survey suggested 78% of online shoppers value green-powered websites. The results of the survey of 543 US adults suggested consumers believe virtual shops should offer green operations, with 60% of people “being swayed to purchase from an online shop if the website identifies itself as using green energy”.

The bottom line here is that online shoppers can’t be that different from your average web host’s end user clientele, so if being green sways people to purchase from a certain site, surely being green is likely to sway people to use a particular host. Perhaps people have abandoned environmental issues in favor of economic issues TOO quickly. Perhaps these issues have merged to some extent. Perhaps these days, people have to be green to get green…