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:

Super Green Hosting

Super Green Hosting provides an absolutely excellent value compared to any other website host, environmentally friendly or not. You’ll get a free domain for life when you sign up, free use of cPanel and Easy Site Builder. More importantly, you’ll be getting a reliable host with a 99.9% uptime and well above-average (though a step or two short of excellent) customer service. More importantly, Super Green Hosting uses efficient servers with low CO2 emissions. And the company itself is 100% carbon neutral company in their opperations.

LEARN MORE & GET YOUR SUPER GREEN HOSTING ACCOUNT

ThinkHost

ThinkHost is the most expensive of green hosts to make our top list. They also arguably have the strongest environmental commitment. Not only is the company 100% carbon neutral but when you open an account with them Think Host will plant a tree for you. The company has no large corporate shareholders and operates something akin to a non-profit committing time and funds to all sort of peace and environmental initiatives.

ThinkHost is also the only host on this list (and one of the few hosts of any sort) to have a 100% uptime guarantee—for every hour your site is down ThinkHost will refund you a day’s worth of your hosting fee. Accounts include unlimited server space, bandwidth, domains and POP email accounts. Their customer service is similar to that of Super Green Hosting (above).

Note: Think Host also made our list of best hosts for a Wordpress blog.

LEARN MORE & GET YOUR THINK HOST ACCOUNT

Green Geeks

Green Geeks bills themselves as 300% Green Web Hosting. That’s not a mere corporate tag line—for every kilowatt of electricity the Green Greeks servers use the company will purchase 3 kilowatts of wind energy credits. Their hosting plan is rather exceptional too. For $6.95 per month you get unlimited bandwidth and server space, a free domain name and use of a drag & drop site builder. In terms of reliability, we’d put Green Geeks a step above Super Green Hosting. Their customer service has a good reputation though we were on hold for quite a while during our test calls.

Give special consideration to Green Geeks if you already have a website and are looking to switch hosting companies. Green Geeks will transfer your current site (no matter how many GB it is) to their servers for free.

LEARN MORE & GET YOUR GREEN GEEKS ACCOUNT

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