The Green Bandwagon
In addition to an alarming trend toward almost-invisible gray text against dark backgrounds, there’s another trend that in my opinion is a marketing con job - “Green” web hosting.
If you have an online business, your website, by its very nature, is green as grass - there are no gasoline fumes in cyberspace! If you’re selling products online, your customers aren’t burning gasoline to get to the mall, and you’re not paying for heating or air conditioning a location. If your customers can go online to ask you a question, or get their invoices online or emailed to them, you’re saving trees.
Supposedly the “green” hosting companies do things like recycling, donate to green charities, etc. to offset their power consumption. But who is setting the standard for this? Who does the certification - is there a certification, or some way of verifying that what they say is actually what they do? Probably not.
As someone who really cares about the environment, instead of charging you extra money every month for the things I do for the environment, I would rather encourage you to do those things yourself - eat less processed food, buy local whenever possible, recycle, drive less (you can live without a car, you know) and walk more. And use the Net!
And then you can pat yourself on the back for your contribution to the cause, more meaningful and much more tangible than a label, and much more valuable than an extra $10 on your bill each month.
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Carolyn
BRAVO!!! I’ve wondered myself about that “Green Hosting” bit. I’ve seen some firms charge quite a bit more too.
Thanks for the article…
Web Wench
AFter I wrote this post, I watched King of the Hill, which was about “Green Marketing” and carbon offsets. It pretty much backed up my point of view!
Ha! Vindicated by Hank Hill! Who would have thought?