Green web hosts, Part 4 of 4

As you can see, we went through quite a process to select our sustainable web hosting provider. I wanted to share all of this detailed information for a couple of reasons.

First of all, if I just came out and said so-and-so is the best green host, how are you to know on what basis I make that recommendation? I may have spent five minutes online to find the best-paying affiliate program (See list from my previous blog post.) and started promoting it with the basic goal of making as much money as possible with a minimum of effort. Of course, I would be calling it the "best green web hosting company with the best customer service and up-time" even though I had never even tried their services. I may not have even read through their entire website beyond the affiliate page to find out how much they would pay me.

By sharing all of the info we uncovered as we narrowed down our options, I hope you can see that we spent much more time in researching our options and that we have actually used (or at least researched thoroughly) the green web host(s) we decide to promote.

Another reason I wanted to share our research: It seemed like such a phenomenal waste of time if someone else couldn't benefit from it as well. So, in the interest of contributing to the greater community of those who would like to step more lightly on the planet, we decided to compile as much information as possible on green web hosting and sustainable hosting providers as we could find all in one place to save others the extensive time we spent in researching all of the options.

Of course, selecting a green web host will be a very personal decision. Everyone will have different values (you may want to choose from among only those hosts who generate their own true green energy, for example) and everyone's website will have different needs.

So, with that said, I'd like to share with you the host we selected and the reasons for our decision. First of all, what we were looking for in a sustainable web hosting provider:

• Price - Even though our values are important to us, we are new entrepreneurs (in fact I'm still working full-time!) and we can't afford to pay a premium price just to get a greener web host. (HostPapa was the cheapest, unless we wanted to pre-pay for 10 years with DreamHost, which we can't afford.)
  
• Storage and bandwidth - Although we don't need a lot right now, we wanted some room for growth. We also didn't think it made sense to pay more for less, or even to get less for the same price as a plan that provided more. (HostPapa has unlimited storage and bandwidth, although DreamHost and ThinkHost are so large as to be virtually unlimited, at least for us there was no real difference here.)
  
• Support for PHP and MySQL - Most green web hosts provided this, but some did not.
  
• Customer service and accessibility - We really liked that HostPapa has extended call-in support hours including 7 days a week. They also have a support center with a huge searchable knowledgebase, video tutorials and more. Our favorite feature though has to be their online instant chat support (also available for extend hours and 7 days a week). We used this several times as we kept thinking of "one more question" and we had our answer very quickly using this feature, both before and after signing onto their hosting package.
• Domain name and privacy features - Though not really a major deciding factor, we really liked the fact that HostPapa would pay for our domain name registration for as long as we continued to host our website with them. (Saving around $10-20 per year, depending on where you get it.) They also automatically mask the personal information in the WHOIS database (Basically, this prevents automatically generated spam and any communication on the domain will be sent to HostPapa. From there, they forward anything that they think you would be genuinely interested in receiving (for example, an offer to purchase your domain name for $1 million dollars). 8^D We were paying an extra $10 for this feature with our previous host.