green hosting

This week Rackspace Hosting unveiled a free online tool, which helps businesses estimate their carbon footprint. The carbon calculator takes into account all aspects of operation--commute, shipping, number of servers, etc. Developed in copperation with Native Energy--an international provider of carbon offsets and emission reductions, the service is the latest addition to Rackspace's Greenspace initiative, which promotes green technology in the data center and energy efficiency.

The web hosting industry is in a very interesting position in the beginning of 2009, heavily influenced by two opposing trends. The first trend is the continuing growth in IT infrastructure and innovation in the sphere of web-related technologies, while the second one is decreased consumer spending in the face of what everyone expects to be a lengthy, unpleasant recession.

1&1 Internet recently launched a new green data center in Lexena, Kansas. The new facility provides space for 40,000 servers and makes it possible to have equal latency for both the East and West coasts by being in the middle of major traffic areas. The company said Kansas City is one of the safest locations to have a data center because the risk of black/brownouts is minimal. 1&1 will also be purchasing purchasing Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs)to match the electricity used at the datacenter.
We talk to Mr. Thorsten Ziegler, Head of 1&1's new U.S. Data Center.

Recently Rackspace announced the results of their second annual green technology customer survey, the completion of an energy-efficient data center, a second annual GreenDay for employees, and an expanded partnership with NativeEnergy to reduce the company’s carbon footprint. We talk to Mr. John Engates, CTO, Rackspace Hosting, about the company's latest green hosting initiatives.