It’s funny, despite how much closer the Internet brings us, sometimes the tech industry can seem oddly impersonal. Well, we take things personally at ServInt. Our customers come to us in search of a partner, someone who has genuine concern –and in some ways a vested interest — in their success.

After all, few things are as personal as one’s livelihood, and all of us at ServInt take our role in the lives of our clients seriously. Our service and our technology power thousands of businesses around the world. People trust us with the foundation of their day to day lives online and they expect us to take that role seriously.

That’s why I’m proud to be one of the public faces of ServInt. I’ve logged plenty of travel time under my belt to make sure that people know we’re a living, breathing group of caring and hardworking people.

Tomorrow I have a fun stack of meetings up in Boston at LinuxCon, which is run by our partners at The Linux Foundation.

If you’re in town and want to sit down and chat, let me know!

Follow Christian on Twitter.

A couple weeks back, I mentioned that I would be speaking at the HostingCon 2010 conference in Austin, TX. I also mentioned that I would post the presentation here for all to see after the conference and I want to make good on my word. The presentation is posted below (after the jump).

The title of my presentation is “Oh My God We’re All Gonna Die”. While the title is intentionally provocative, the message is, I think, pretty optimistic. Our industry is changing rapidly, while we’ll be forced to innovate and compete on a whole new scale, it will mean a leaner operation for businesses and better and more affordable services for end users.

Since there is no video of the presentation (sorry about that), I’ll try and sum it up as best as I can here.

In my view, the webhosting industry of today can be compared to the automobile industry more than 100 years ago. Prior to the assembly line, there were many competing fuel standards (much like the various web standards we have to contend with), there were no road standards or highways, the expectations and needs of your average car owner at the time were considerably less stringent than today.

When the big three automakers essentially equalized the industry, they destroyed a lot of peripheral businesses in the process, but we all benefited from the standards they introduced, the products they created, and the technology they helped cultivate. What resulted was a new, healthier, more vibrant industry where niche companies could still thrive despite the big guys’ presence.

Cloud technologies, and the behemoths entering our industry who dominate the space, are bringing with them an entirely new way of delivering hosting services. For businesses that are willing to do the legwork and innovate within the cloud, there is plenty of room to grow and prosper. However, those that have sat back, stacked racks, and tried to coast are going to learn very harsh lessons in the coming months.

I believe that what makes this cloud evolution so interesting is not necessarily the technology – after all, virtualization is nothing new – but the mechanisms surrounding it that allow it to flourish.

In other words, it’s not the cars themselves that are interesting or transformative, it’s the assembly line.

Without further ado: “Oh My God We’re All Gonna Die.”

I think it’s perfectly clear that this industry is changing before our eyes and all of us at ServInt have certainly taken notice. While I don’t have anything to announce just yet, you can rest assured we have some incredible products and services coming in the next few weeks that will put a lot of these arguments into practice.

In the meantime, stay tuned and keep your head out of the clouds.

Thoughts? Comments? Angry protestations? Let me know in the comments, on Twitter, or on Facebook!

Follow Christian Dawson on Twitter.

Photo by pangalactic gargleblaster.

As you may have heard, I’ll be speaking at HostingCon 2010 next week in balmy, beautiful, and weird Austin, TX. I love Austin and am really looking forward to mingling with friends and industry colleagues, but I thought I’d mention something about my presentation before I hopped on a plane to the Lone Star State.

The name of my presentation is:

“Oh My God We’re All Gonna Die: The Future of Webhosting…and What We Can Do About It.”

Now, I admit the title is a bit provocative, but I want to be clear that what I think is going to happen to our industry in the next few years will completely transform the landscape of the web.

What this presentation will spell out are what I believe to be the coming shifts in web hosting and web infrastructure in the next few years. Like the automotive industry more than a century ago, the web is a chaotic marketplace with competing platforms and standards.

Whether it’s Windows and Linux, WebM vs OGG vs H.264, or Open vs Proprietary, the movers and shakers on the web are still arguing over foundational issues. We are only now beginning to see a crystallization of standards, and along with it we’re seeing the entrance of technology behemoths creating and promptly capturing entire segments of the internet economy.

I’ll be out of the office for a few days after I give my presentation, but I’ll be sure to post it here for all to see as soon as I’m back and am looking forward to your thoughts and feedback.

Questions? Comments? Leave a comment below, Like us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter!

Follow Christian Dawson on Twitter.

Over the weekend, WordPress contacted us in response to that post. They took issue with a few points and sent us a heartfelt and thoughtful response outlining some of the work they had done to battle their outage. The conversation was enlightening and caused us to reflect differently on the outage.

As you may know, we’ve never shied away from defending a competitor that was doing the right thing. We were very public in our support for Rackspace — one of our largest competitors and industry colleagues — last year during its series of tragic outages.

We’ve also never had a problem challenging those that weren’t. When a new wave of “solar powered” hosts began targeting eco-oriented blogs and lambasting them for hosting with companies like ServInt, we called them out on it and pointed out our own green credentials.

We have always treated our blog as a public facing forum for ideas, we want readers to know that real people with real emotions and opinions work at ServInt. I think it’s that willingness to engage in constructive and frank conversations that set us apart from other people in this industry who would rather play it safe.

So, thanks again to our friends at WordPress for sharing the information with us that they did. WordPress powers our blog and is the cornerstone of our own Blog VPS line, so it goes without saying that we’re fans and love the platform. As an active member of the Linux Foundation and as open source stewards for more than a decade, we love and admire innovative companies that help make software development free and community driven. The WP staff and community have done great things for the Internet and are clearly talented, brilliant assets to the web.

Here are a couple of the responses the folks at WordPress pointed us to:

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg’s blog post detailing the outage.

WordPress.com support forums.

Again, we appreciate their reaching out and setting the record straight.

Have something to say? Don’t forget to comment! You can follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

When I walked into the office today, my various RSS feeds, Twitter apps, and news aggregators were lit up with news of WordPress.com’s outage.

Now, we’ve made our position on the viability of free platforms known before. They’re great if you’re just goofing around, but they’re not so great if you’re trying to make a living. WordPress.com hosts millions of blogs, the vast majority of them being relatively simple “Here’s what I’m having for lunch” fare, and that’s absolutely fine.

However, they host lots of popular blogs and they have a VIP program with some pretty big names including TechCrunch, GigaOM, and a couple of CNN’s blogs. Those are sites that have a lot of users counting on them and WordPress made them look really bad today. With almost no outward communication other than a cheeky 404 page, a lot of businesses were in the dark about why their sites were down.

Outages happen, we get that, and we certainly don’t fault WordPress.com or Matt (Mullenweg, WordPress founder) for what happened without knowing more details. We love WordPress at ServInt – we use WordPress software right here on this blog – and we truly appreciate their contributions to open source. WordPress does not, to my knowledge, have any sort of issue with recurring outages. By and large, they have been extraordinarily successful, historically stable, and until last night their millions of users were probably 100% happy.

But, this outage is yet another example of the danger small businesses have when they rely purely on free services, and it’s also further proof that many of these services simply don’t understand the need for urgency in keeping their users informed. I understand not wanting to jump the gun and announce speculative or preliminary information, but the fact that really nothing was said is troubling.

I know this is going to sound incredibly cheesy but it’s true; ServInt has nothing but VIP clients.

Because we’re accountable to each and every one of our customers, and because we have an exchange of goods and an associated Service Level Agreement, we have a vested personal and financial interest in ensuring that you stay up as close to 100% of the time as is physically possible. As a result, our VPS and SuperVPS platform has an average of five 9′s of uptime (99.999%). We’re not perfect – those five 9′s aren’t a 1 and two zero’s – but we do everything we can to get as close to perfection as possible.

ServInt already hosts incredibly popular blogs like Android and Me, Sports by Brooks, and The Mac Observer, just to name a few, so rest assured that this is an apples to apples comparison. This isn’t so much a criticism of WordPress as a company; after all they make a great product and are a tremendous benefit to the internet as a community. This is a larger critique of companies that treat hosting as little more than cheap, forgettable infrastructure. It’s like building a mansion on clay instead of concrete; you learn – quickly – that skimming costs off of your foundation is a bad idea.

People come to us so they can start small and grow. We’re a service company that manages the foundational infrastructure of the web. Because we do what we do so well, incredibly powerful and complex sites can grow and thrive, make lots of money, and spawn even more terrific sites. When a foundation is solid, success is contagious, WordPress as a platform is a great example of that. Their hosting infrastructure and communication, however, has room for improvement.

I don’t want this to sound vindictive, nor is my aim to “poach” customers or do some sort of “rescue” pitch to angry WordPress clients. Events like this make our industry look bad as a whole, and I’m saddened whenever a company as stellar as WordPress drops the ball.

When real hosts – people who know this business – have a catastrophic outage, they’re communicative, responsive, and as transparent as possible. Companies that take their hosting customers for granted quickly prove they have a lot to learn.

Think I’m way off base? Let me know in the comments, on Facebook, or on Twitter.

Follow Eric Morales on Twitter.

Everybody loves a sale. The other day I was shopping for birdseed at Lowe’s, a home improvement and hardware store here in the states. As I perused the store, I noticed a sale that just blew me away.

Brace yourself for it — it’s a big one.

WOW! A whole penny off!

In the few minutes I spent marveling (snickering, really) at this “special offer,” a couple of people immediately gravitated toward the “sale” birdseed and snatched them up without even stopping to see what kind of sale it was.

The sale, of course, was a trick – a sleight of hand designed to grab people in a hurry. I started thinking about other types of sales, what these sales communicated about the products and the companies who sell them – and how many of the worst sales tactics out there are used commonly in the webhosting industry.

The Lowe’s ‘birdseed sale’ picture above is a prime example of one of these tactics.

Over the course of the last couple of days I took a few other photographs around town that I think tell you about other common kinds of sales promotions. Most sales are smokescreens, and if you step back you can see through the haze. Let’s go into a few of the most common offenders, starting with:

Sale Type #1: The Fake Bargain

My sale is designed to sell you what I want you to buy, not what you need.

Did you know that in many cases the aisle caps at supermarkets don’t feature actual sales?

When you or I see a stack of sodas, cereal, or other neatly stacked products with a big red pricing sign, we’d usually assume we’re getting a discount. But more often than not, those prices aren’t any lower than normal. Instead, in many cases, what you’re seeing is the work of a product manufacturer who’s struck a deal with the retail chain to prominently display whatever product the manufacturer wants or needs to sell that week.

This tactic relies heavily on research that’s shown that many shoppers buy on the presumption of value. Shoppers inherently “trust” the placement of products to show them what is preferred within a given product category, big manufacturers treat this “store detailing” as another form of advertising.  The bottom line is: you move to purchase a great deal, but usually you’re actually paying regular price.

So what does this have to do with hosting?

Sadly, a lot more than you might think.  Many hosting companies employ similar tactics, “featuring” old, unpopular hosting products with vague descriptions and using the illusion of a sale to do it. There are countless companies that ‘feature’ VPS products at discount rates, but with no spec list in sight, when you peek behind the hyperbole there’s not much left.

Here’s what we say: Price your product accordingly from the get go. If consumers think it’s worth it, you’ll do well; if not, then you won’t. When ServInt has a sale, we mean it.

As for me, I went and bought my birdseed at a local nursery.

Sale Type #2: But WAIT, there’s MORE!!!

My product doesn’t have much value, and probably isn’t very good.

Everyone wants cheap explosives!

Infomercials are built on the premise of taking something that’s mostly useless and convincing people to buy it so they don’t miss out on a ‘great deal’.

Look at the picture to the left (or above if you’re on a phone) and think about what it is, exactly, that you would consider purchasing were you in the market for small, celebratory explosives.

Would you pay full price for one item knowing they think so little of their product they’d throw two more in for free? As a smart consumer, and as an explosion-loving American, I’m looking at the one thing they *won’t* give away:  the “Assortments.”

If fireworks and the internet have anything in common, it’s that when somebody is trying to give you something for “free,”  they’re either giving you something they don’t want, or they’ve jacked up the price on the thing you have to buy to get the free thing (I realize that was a mouthful, but I’m sticking with it).

They’re still making money, which is fine, but you’re being lied to, which is not fine.

Of course, that doesn’t hold true in every case, but by and large the infomercial technique is a common, and surprisingly effective, sleazy sales tactic.

Here’s what we say: if your hosting company gives away something with a product that is having its prices slashed, ask yourself why. Think about who paid full price for it, and imagine whether they feel ripped off. Ask yourself whether you’ll feel ripped off if they slash prices again.

If it’s something important – like hosting – on which you run your business – ask what else they’re slashing along with their prices. Are they sacrificing customer service in order to send new signups a free toaster? Are they updating their infrastructure as quickly as they update their goodie bags?

A cheap product, including a lot of hosting, is cheap for a reason. When the crux of a marketing strategy is giving away stuff to help justify the cost, well, buyer beware. Big sales like this should lead to big questions, because when somebody is devaluing their product line there’s usually a reason and it’s usually not good.

Sale Type #3: The ‘Facade’ Discount

Jacking up the ‘normal’ retail price only to create the illusion of a big discount later.

They starch their prices, too!

Dry cleaners and Rug stores, to name just two, are pretty notorious for this famous discount scam.

The idea is simple, advertise huge discounts on previously inflated prices.

Nevermind that nobody has ever payed ‘full price’ on these things; the ‘full price’ itself is often arbitrary and unreasonable.

With that being said, advertising a large percentage off of a borderline fictitious top price is still, somehow, compelling.

We see this kind of scheme in hosting all the time – it’s most often associated with hosts trying to sell old products that are losing relevance. Old dedicated servers are often put on sale at deep monthly discounts, because they’re not as powerful, or redundant, or frankly useful as their modern equivalents.

That’s a perfectly acceptable thing to do, after all there are plenty of uses for legacy hardware if you have a relatively static site, but the issue is with the disingenuousness of the discount itself.

When these products are advertised at “X% off” they don’t explain that they’re discounting from a price that hasn’t been relevant since 2006!

Here’s What We Say: There’s nothing wrong with discounting older solutions, especially if they’re compelling products in their own right. But passing off something as brand new and cutting edge is just bad business, and it’s far more pervasive in our industry than it should be.

Don’t forget, check back here later for Part 2 of the 5 worst products in webhosting!

Do you have an example of a discount scam? Let us know in the comments, on Facebook, or on Twitter!

Follow Christian on Twitter.

1) Bulletproof hosting

Photo by amayu

What the customer is meant to assume: “I don’t want my sites to go down no matter what happens. So I want them to be bulletproof, right?”

Cracking the code: The host is a haven for criminals. Are you one?

Want to SPAM, distribute warez, pirate Avatar, or stream child porn on your servers? Go nuts!

You can be as illegal as you want and they won’t pull the plug. They’ll hide from the authorities so you don’t have to!

The bottom line: A respectable business doesn’t want “bulletproof” hosting. Period.

2) Unlimited hosting

Photo by Erica Marshall of muddyboots.org

What the customer is meant to assume: ” I don’t want limits on my hosting! Who wants limits on their hosting? Of course I want my hosting to be unlimited!!111″

Cracking the code: I’ve made my feelings on Unlimited Hosting well known.

In the context of these providers, “Unlimited” really means “We’re not  going to tell you how well your systems are going to be able to scale, so good luck growing!” These providers bet on the majority of their users simply not using that many resources to compensate for those that do. But believe me, there’s a limit, a responsible provider will simply boot any abuser off their network if they start taking the term “unlimited” literally.

Contrast this with a provider like us who tells you precisely what you’re getting for your hard earn money and I think you’ll agree we have the better business model.

It’s a lazy, lying marketing game to call a hosting product unlimited and I am still disgusted that otherwise respectable hosts use it.

The bottom line: If you want to set yourself up for surprise failure, buy into the hype – go unlimited.

3) Cheap hosting

Photo by ecastro

What the customer is meant to assume: “These guys are amazing! I’ve never heard of them but they say they can host my whole business and give me 100% uptime and rock solid support for a few bucks a month. Of course I want to save the money and get me some cheap hosting!”

Cracking the code: If it’s too good to be true, it is. We’ve been around for over 15 years, and we’ve seen more dead, failed, shuttered hosts than you can imagine.

Many of them were hot for a while before they up and died. Most lie about their infrastructure and experience to get you to pull the trigger.

Experience matters. Transparency matters too.

Learn about who you are trusting your business to, and figure out what you’re giving up when hunting for a bargain.

The bottom line: Going out of business is not cheap. Stay away from cheap hosting.

4) Free hosting

Photo by Lori Spindler

What the customer is meant to assume: “I get to put up anything I want and you won’t charge me anything? Where do I sign up? Of course I want free hosting!”

Cracking the code: Somebody else gets to make money off of the efforts you put in. Somebody else gets to exert control over you if they want to, whether you are doing something illegal or not. Somebody else is deciding what resources you need to grow. And they are getting a big cut of the fruits of your labor, which isn’t very ‘free’ at the end of the day.

Whether they are selling ads based on your content, or whether they are simply taking a cut of your revenue or of the traffic that you attract, that’s money you’re not getting. With a provider like ServInt, you know exactly what you’re getting.

The bottom line: TANSTAAFL. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Know what you’re giving up to get a free resource. If you are popular in the least, I’ll bet it’s far more than what you could gain by taking control yourself.

5) Windows hosting

Photo by Justin Marty

What the customer is meant to assume: “I’ll get the same level of usability, security, performance, and reliability that I get on my Windows desktop! Of course I want Windows hosting!”

Cracking the code: You’ll get the same level of usability, security, performance, and reliability that you get on your Windows desktop! Yikes!

The bottom line: Ok ok, that was mostly a joke. Windows hosting does indeed do some things really well.

But as a general rule, the infrastructure that supports the bulk of the Internet is Open Source and the vast majority of server related applications, and the innovation guiding them, is based on free and open software.

In general, steer clear of Windows hosting unless you absolutely need it for a specific technological reason.

Cracking the code,

Christian

Agree? Disagree? Let me know in the comments, on Twitter, or on our Facebook page!

Photo credits: amayu, Erica Marshall, ecastro, Lori Spindler, Justin Marty.

On Being Fearless

When ServInt was founded in 1995, there were less than 18,000 dotcoms in the world.

That fact, according to an article on CNN.com yesterday, is pretty jarring when you think about it. It truly emphasizes just how much of a frontier the Internet was for entrepreneurs. How so many companies, in the shadow of the giants (at the time) at Netscape, AOL, and others, got started by refusing to believe that innovation was purely a numbers game.

Nearly everyday there are seismic shifts in how we do business online. While the Internet certainly shrunk our world by opening up new, relatively inexpensive lines of communication internationally, it arguably also did the opposite in many ways. The Internet expanded, exponentially, the size and scope of the planet from an intellectual and communicative standpoint. No longer were we limited by continents and language, we were free to do and say as we pleased in a new network of ideas. New markets sparked by young ambition sprang out of tiny packets of 1′s and 0′s traveling at the speed of light. Borders became more and more irrelevant and a new kind of global technologically-centered culture began to flourish.

Yesterday, the dotcom Top Level Domain turned 25 years old. ServInt also recently completed our 10,000th turn-up. These are two very different events with very different scopes, of course, but they’re noteworthy for the exact same reasons.

I personally sometimes find it odd to think that we still pay attention to events such as Internet anniversaries. However, despite their very old-world, pre-web genesis, anniversaries help us gain a concept of how far we’ve come. They’re a mile-marker on the highway, a notch on the door sill. Seemingly arbitrary marks that somehow still tell a story about a creation so expansive and fluid that it almost makes the idea of ‘age’ and ‘progression’ seem, well, obsolete.

The ‘dotcom’ moniker abstracted commerce in modern economics. It enabled the creation of incredibly powerful and lucrative technologies and services that had no physical presence. It abstracted so much of what we do on a day to day basis that industries were created to simplify them.

The success of ServInt, represented by our 10,000th turn-up, isn’t the biggest bit of news in the world today. However, it is a testament to the power of ‘dotcom’. Those four characters at the end of most URLs have done more to change the face of the planet in the past 25 years than just about any other technological achievement before it. Our 10,000th turn-up symbolizes the trust and dedication our customers have in who we are. It shows our customers believe in what we do, and it underscores our own commitment to constantly better ourselves as we grow with you, the budding Internet entrepreneur.

However, the number ’10,000′ is also misleading. Take our VPS line for example. Well before we reached VPS number 1, we had already turned up thousands of clients the old-fashioned way. We built their servers by hand, racked them, and managed them one by one for nearly a decade. That kind of experience is hard to find, and even harder to match. It’s the reason we’ve outlived so many of our competitors through thick and thin.

So the number 10,000, while nice, doesn’t really speak to what we’ve accomplished holistically. It speaks to what we’ve accomplished lately.

Today, our competitors range from bored teenagers in Europe, Asia, and South America all the way to the Fortune 100 behemoths in Redmond, Mountain View, and elsewhere. We’ve built relationships with our customers one server at a time, and we’ve done it more than 10,000 times for more than 15 years.

This brings us back full circle to the surprising bit of trivia that opened this post.

When ServInt was founded in 1995, there were less than 18,000 dotcoms in the world. We didn’t know what the Internet was going to become, but we knew it was going somewhere. We knew we were helping to build something much larger than ourselves, and we continue to do so today.

In 2010, there are millions, if not billions, of dotcoms. The driver behind that growth isn’t just experience (we have that) and it isn’t just ambition (check). It’s fearlessness.

We define fearlessness as the ability to see uncertainty as opportunity. From our point of view, it’s the one constant virtue in all successful businesses and we believe we’ve made fearlessness a habit at ServInt.

So Happy (belated) Birthday dotcom! Here’s to another 25 years!

Photo by Conor Keller.
Editors Note: The title and some text was changed to more accurately reflect ServInt’s product line.

Green is vital, but so is pragmatism

Right up there with “The Cloud”, Green hosting has been a heavily trafficked buzzword in our industry for nearly 3 years.

In 2008, ServInt began retrofitting its data centers and, in combination with a massive investment in reforestation projects all over the world, we became climate positive within one year. We strive to be green because we know we have to, we have a responsibility to do so as a growing business with international clientele who expect their hosting company to understand the impact it has on the world around them.

In other words, we get it and want to do our part for the right reasons.

More after the jump.

Let’s Be Honest

Like other tech related fields, our industry has not been kind to the environment. We never saw the connection between providing services on the web and the climate. Indeed, billions of people and millions of businesses worldwide ignored climate change because the damage was subtle, out of sight, and concurrently out of mind. Now we know better. We wanted to tackle this issue head-on with three goals:

• To reduce the pollution, directly and indirectly, caused by our data centers.
• To create more sustainable infrastructure.
• To, in conjunction with the above, reduce our industry’s contribution to climate change.

In recent months there have been numerous companies who have been focusing on the competitive advantages of an entirely green operation. We think that’s great, and we welcome the competition. It keeps us on our toes and challenges us to better streamline our efforts to combat climate change.

However, another side of this debate has popped up that has turned ugly fast. A few firms have been vocally calling out popular eco-oriented websites for hosting with companies that they (the host) deemed to be damaging to the environment. Some of these companies are making what are at best mean-spirited out of context accusations and at worst outright lies about companies like ours.

ServInt has a great reputation in this industry because we focus on the experience of our customers, not the shortcomings of our competitors. We have a lot of friends who we also compete with, and we’ve even come to the defense of competitors in the past when the situation called for it. We especially NEVER publicly talk down on a competitor unless we feel that they are actively harming our industry. But very few people want to talk about this issue when their businesses are not 100% “green”, so allow me.

Just the facts ma’am

Lets parse a few of the arguments these companies are making (and please feel free to challenge me in the comments):

“[Insert company here] is a fossil fuel host because they have data centers in major cities.”

This is an interesting (read: dumb) argument that I haven’t heard before. The argument I think they’re making here is that companies such as ServInt have data centers in large urban areas which presumably use the traditional power grid. These power grids typically generate energy through environmentally damaging means, so their argument says that hosting with such a company could classify you as being part of the problem.

Without delving into the thousands of asterisks associated with this idea, let’s focus on the actual business decisions that dictate why ServInt, and thousands of other hosts, choose to build and lease data centers in urban areas.

The vast majority of the world’s premium bandwidth sits in these urban areas. As an Enterprise-class host, it’s completely unacceptable to build our entire business on second tier connections. It’s also not logical to tear down a building in the heart of a major city just to build a LEED certified data center in every situation.

The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification (LEED) is arguably the best and most comprehensive green building standard in the world. However, LEED is a point-based system and doesn’t necessarily take environmental impact into consideration in every case. While there are plenty of initiatives that are aiming to change this, LEED isn’t perfect.  For example, points can be earned for installing showers and changing rooms in a building. While that would be a legitimate boon for a company that urged walking and biking to work…it could also mean LEED points and tax breaks for an executives-only gym.

The true environmental impact of the construction, the effect on local traffic, and the reengineering of the power grid all have to be taken into consideration when building a data center anywhere. The LEED process minimizes many of those concerns, but not all.

Finally, the term “fossil-fuel host” is misleading, we are not throwing coal into a furnace or using gasoline to power our servers. The Sierra Club’s National Headquarters are in San Francisco, and National Geographic’s Headquarters are in Washington, D.C., yet no one would ever consider either of these two great organizations part of the problem.

“We are better because we build our own data centers, use solar power, and liquid cooling.”

Building private data centers is an important part of any successful, medium to large-scale host’s business strategy. Construction and fiber connections still need to be taken into account when all of your data centers are located outside of major metropolitan areas.

It’s very nice that you have a solar powered, liquid-cooled data center. But how did you get the fiber connection to your facility? Were the utility workers riding bicycles? Do you have environmentally friendly engineering in place to ensure uptime?

What about your redundancy? Are the batteries you’re presumably using at night environmentally sound as well? What about backup power, are your backup generators running on environmentally friendly energy sources? How effective are all of these redundancies for companies who absolutely require constant uptime?

“Carbon offsets, environmental investment, and reforestation investments are not a solution.”

We completely agree. Carbon offsets need to be properly vetted to make sure that monies are being utilized efficiently, honestly, and where they are actually needed. They are an imperfect band-aid on the long road to a solution.

However, investing in more energy efficient equipment, optimizing and deploying virtualized product lines in favor of traditional dedicated products, and planting trees are absolutely beneficial. These are things we can do NOW, with hard work, energy, and investment.

ServInt recently completed it’s 2009 reforestation goal, and since starting the program not too long ago we’ve planted more than 12,000 trees all while continually improving the efficiency of our network infrastructure. Because of these initiatives, our entire VPS and SuperVPS line are climate-positive.

But we know that isn’t enough. We know more needs to be done. Photoshopping a leaf onto your logo doesn’t automatically change who you are as a company.

That’s why we strive to share what we’ve learned with the hosting industry, including some of our competitors who aren’t as far along. Last year, ServInt COO Christian Dawson spoke at HostingCon on this very topic with the hopes of minimizing the initial sticker shock that prevents hundreds of otherwise socially conscious hosts from taking the plunge. We’ll continue to be a player in an open, honest debate over how best to combat climate change in our industry and we welcome insight, challenges, and debates.

Let us know what you think in the comments, on Facebook, or on Twitter.

The internet is a market of ideas; a true democratization of knowledge. That democratization has also brought an unparalleled connection to the goings on in the world around us. On January 12th, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck just a few miles from the capital of Port-au-Prince, ravaging the capital city and killing an estimated 200,000 people while displacing millions.

The web of ideas brought us images of the suffering, social media provided context and stories of individuals and families who have been directly affected by this disaster, and individuals and organizations worldwide opened their hearts to those affected through innovative donation mechanisms and sheer generosity.

However, many of those donations are unable to be distributed for 90 days. That means 3 long months of toil and recovery in the face of frustrating bureacracy. As an industry that truly understands how investment and resources are utilized on the web we knew we could do better and we’re proud to announce this unprecedented initiative.

In an effort to give back as effectively as possible, the most influential players in webhosting have banded together with the American Red Cross to give aid directly to those suffering in Haiti right now. Along with our friends at Rackspace, The Planet, Peer1, and GoGrid, all of us at ServInt are urging our supporters, customers, friends, families, and employees to donate to Hosting for Haiti.

There are no ulterior motives here. YOU can choose precisely how your tax-deductible gift will be used. You can donate directly to the relief fund in Haiti or you can help the American Red Cross’ International Response fund, as we have done. The choice is yours.

ServInt is proud to stand side by side with our esteemed colleagues in the webhosting world in encouraging you to join us and consider making a donation. Every little bit counts and we feel honored to do our part helping this small nation in a big way.

Please visit HostingforHaiti.com for more information.