Hosting Goes Solar

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For the would-be Web host, power is an essential consideration. Servers and routers consume an enormous amount of energy, and electrical bills are a major part of most hosting companies’ overhead. In fact, hosting companies place such heavy demands on their power suppliers that the hosting industry is the principal consumer of electricity in California’s Silicon Valley, a region that has recently been plagued with erratic and extremely costly brownouts.

However, the Virginia-based hosting company SolarHost has made a splash in the world of Internet commerce by forgoing traditional power sources - and instead harnessing the power of the sun. Solar energy is not only environmentally friendly, but it also offers self-sufficiency; SolarHost fuels its entire operation with 24 Siemens SR-100 solar panels (also known as photovoltaic cells), and stores the collected energy in a battery bank that weighs more than 4,000 pounds.

This is all very well and good, you might say, but can I trust a host whose power supply shuts down whenever it rains? The truth is that SolarHost doesn’t shut down in the rain, or on cloudy days, or at night. In fact, the company’s high-density arrays absorb far more power than the company needs, and, by retaining all of the excess in storage batteries, the company is easily able to sustain itself during darkness. SolarHost has been down for only 11 minutes since it was founded last March, and guarantees its customers a maximum of one hour of downtime over the course of the year.

In the eyes of some of its customers, SolarHost is actually more reliable than the competition.

Although the company’s planet-friendly approach to Web hosting has made it popular with environmental organizations - such as eVoyage, The Greener Business Guide and The Interstate Renewable Energy Council - many commercial ventures have also signed on, lured by the promise of SolarHost’s reliable, independent power supply. After all, for an Enterprise-level business, several hours of downtime can lead to literally millions of dollars in lost income.

As Seen On: Tophosts.com