It’s Not Easy Selling Green

By Liam Eagle

Hosts are making big “green” hosting promises, but crafting a marketing message for green hosting can be tricky as consumers become more wary of “greenwashing” dressing ordinary products and services up in eco-friendly rhetoric

A student of the history of the green movement might consider April 22, 1990, Earth Day, the moment the environment was acknowledged as an issue of universal public interest, as more than 200 million people marked the occasion by participating in events worldwide.

It is also approximately the moment, unsurprisingly, that businesses began incorporating “green” messages into their marketing efforts in earnest, catering their messages to a well-known concern of the average person. Though in many cases, the actual shift to green business practices has been a slower process.

The green movement in the hosting business has developed quickly, and the “green hosting” message has cropped up at a similar pace in the several years since the extent of data center power consumption has become a more public concern. But unlike in many other markets, the shift to greener business practices in hosting has a direct economic motivation.

“The whole green movement,” says Curtis R. Curtis, senior VP of sales and marketing at Superb Internet, “has a lot more hype than reality to it. That said, I feel like the data center business is going to be the exception, and it has to be the exception. The economic requirements behind the greening of data centers are going to be what drives it. For data centers, greening has immediate impact. Automatically you’re going to save money.”

Hosts almost don’t have to make the decision to go green – it’s a natural consequence of increasingly costly and scarce energy resources. And it’s a cost-cutting move long-term. But they do have to make the decision on how they communicate those efforts to their customers.

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Tags: data center, Earth Day, marketing, virtualization