It probably isn’t feasible for you to drive an all-electric vehicle, grow your own organic food or power your house entirely off of solar panels. That’s okay. It can make a big difference to the planet when of people take small steps towards reducing their carbon footprint.

Like using a more environmentally-friendly website host.

Website hosting is a surprisingly electricity-intensive (and thus surprisingly polluting) enterprise. A single website server can produce as much as 12.5 tones of CO2 each year. It is estimated that by 2020 the website hosting companies will be as polluting as the airline industry!

Fortunately, there are a variety of green website hosts. We’ve found several that offer as good a service, for as cheap a price, as the regular polluting hosting companies provide. Here are our three favorites:

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We love blogging. We love the WordPress blog platform.

We are not enamored by most blog hosts.

If you want to run a WordPress blog with your own domain name (which we suggest) then you’ll need to find a good website host. But it’s a hyper-competitive business, website hosting is. To cut costs most hosting companies skimp on service and reduce their reliability standards. Hosting companies generally get away with this (for a few months, anyway) because most customers make their choice of host by looking at the price and nothing else.

Do not be one of those customers. The difference between a low and high quality host is the difference between your WordPress blog being down a few minutes per month and being down hours (or days!); it is the difference being able to talk to hosting company technician on the phone and being relegated to seeking help through maddening online chat system.

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