In addition to their commitment to a sustainable future, their servers are powered by wind and solar green energy credits, they plant a tree for every new account they aquire, and 10% of their annual revenue is spent supporting environmental and humanitarian projects.

As Michael stated when asked about power generation, “we leave the power generation to the experts, which allows us to focus on what we do best - web hosting. We purchase green tags (50% wind/50% solar) that have been certified by Green-e, an independent certification and verification program for renewable energy. Our provider is the Bonneville Environmental Foundation in Portland, Oregon.” They regularly do an electricity foot print analysis so they know how many green credits to buy.

ThinkHost's offices are decentralized so that their employees do not have to commute, and can telecommute to meetings instead. Their servers are mostly Pentium based, with a RAID Hard drive Configuration. They are running FreeBSD with an in-house developed account management software that, as Maichal claims, it “has a fraction of the overhead of commercially available products: this means less servers are required in order to provide stable service to our clients.”

I wanted to know why a hosting company would go the socially responsible route. Michael responded “We were founded in 1999 and have always been very active in supporting the community; particularly projects focused on humanitarian and environmental issues. I believe it was 2003 when we decided to incorporate our progressive principle- based approach more as a focus rather than just something we did on the side when it became quite apparent the writing was on the wall for business - the "business as usual" approach simply isn't sustainable."

"The environment is in big trouble, society is in trouble and we wanted to play our part in trying to help address some of those issues; both directly through our own initiatives and indirectly through supporting those on the front lines of positive social change.”

ThinkHost is a company that throughly supports nonprofits--most of their employees are (or have been) active in non-profit work. They value the work these organizations provide to society through consciousness-raising and addressing some of the major problems that humanity faces now and in the years to come.

When asked what their goals for the future were, Michael responded: “we'd just like to continue to grow at a sustainable rate, deliver the very best services we can and help raise awareness of issues such as global warming and other forms of environmental degradation. A hosting company has a great deal of reach and I think every company in the industry should be doing what they can to relay these messages and taking serious steps to addressing their own impact on a planet under a great deal of stress.”

In looking for a new host we had the problem of trying to find a company that would fit into our mandate of trying to create a more sustainable future. ThinkHost meets our criteria in many ways and we feel very privileged to be running a website that is entirely powered by the wind and sun. If you are looking for a green host for your company or website, definitely consider ThinkHost--not only are they very reasonable on the wallet, but also invested in the future health of our planet.