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How the Green Data Center Revolution Affects Your Website

Most Internet users think of a website as existing strictly in the virtual world, however, every website requires a hosting computer, and that host computer both uses electricity and produces a lot of heat that must be dissipated.

By John Stevens

Mar 29, 2016

When you pay a web-hosting company to host your site, you are essentially contracting with that business to store your website's coded information on their computers and make it available to everyone in every country around the world, 24 hours a day, 365 day a year. However, your hosting company may store your website's information on its own hard drives or lease storage space from a third party. Of course, the computers the web host owns or rents are not the standard laptops and desktops that most consumers are familiar with. To the contrary, these are typically one of several hundred, or even a few thousand, dedicated hard drives accessed by large banks of servers housed in a data center at an off-site location. This site is often halfway around the world at a location the company may or may not choose to make you aware of.

It is not so much that the data center's location is top secret, as most hosting companies will tell you where their storage facilities are located and even how they operate, in most cases. However, the average website owner or programer tends to not be overly concerned about where their data is being physically stored, provided their website is available to users 24/7.

One very important aspect of data center web hosting that most consumers are not even aware of is if their website's data is being stored too far off site, it can slow down loading times as well as affect "location factoring" in Google's ranking algorithms. These are just a couple of the concerns you should have about where your website data is being stored in the real world. Besides the potential to affect loading times and ranking factors, the type of data center your hosting company uses can also affect both the cost of your hosting and your website's footprint.

Environmental Costs of Web HostingMost Internet users think of a website as existing strictly in the virtual world, however, every website requires a hosting computer, and that host computer both uses electricity and produces a lot of heat that must be dissipated. According to the website greenhousedata.com, the carbon footprint of just an averaged-sized data center will range from between three million and 130 million kilograms of produced CO2. This means if all the data centers in the world formed a nation, that country would be the fifth-largest consumer of energy on the planet.

Source: How the Green Data Center Revolution Affects Your Website