You Know What Kermit Says…
“It’s not easy bein’ green.“ I’m pretty sure he wasn’t talking about Green Hosting companies, but the sentiment applies there too. However with a little digging, you can find the right Green Host for you!
I narrowed my options to a few contenders by scouring the internet for reliable reviewers like WebsiteBuildingExpert, TechRadar and Sustainable Business Toolkit and avoiding anyone selling hosting products or services. I also referenced “Blogging for dummies” for insights, but they don’t discuss Green Hosting, at least not in the 7th edition.
The top choices compiled from my online recommendations are GreenGeeks, iPage, HostPapa, A2 Hosting and DreamHost. Many offer free domain name registration for the first year. All five companies offer solid green policies, with GreenGeeks the top winner in that arena. They are considered not just carbon neutral, but “carbon reducing” due to their 300% renewable energy commitment. iPage offers 200% renewable energy offsets while HostPapa purchases 100% of their equivalent energy usage from a certified green energy provider. A2 Hosting has been carbon neutral since 2007. DreamHost is not carbon reducing or carbon neutral from what I can tell from their marketing materials, but they do have other green policies in place including using some renewable energy sources.
When it comes to ease of use, that’s a whole other ballgame. As a newbie to the blogging world, making things easy to implement and maintain is critical. Thinking ahead to what could go wrong and asking how a platform addresses those possibilities is a good place to start. What if I get hacked, or I make a change that messes up the site? Does the host company perform automatic back-ups or will I need to? Do they make it easy to restore my site to an earlier version? What about keeping the WordPress software, PHP programming language and MySQL database up to date with the most recent versions to help prevent a security breach? Do they make sure my SSL certificate is current? If you’re like me and don’t know your PHP from your SSL, no worries – explanations are ahead.
Okay, let’s start with backups. You need to backup your blog in case your site gets hacked. All of these hosting companies offer automatic back-ups at some payment level, but restoring the blog to an earlier version is easier with some than others. DreamHost offers easy, 1-click restore functionality, as does HostPapa and A2 Hosting, though not at all price levels. iPage offers a “Back-up and Restore” tool as an add on to any of their plans. Compare that to GreenGeeks who require you to call tech support and open a ticket to get access to the backup, and they don’t restore it for you, they just give you the backup. Who knows how long it will take to restore your site. For someone like me who’s completely new to this, figuring out how to implement the backup could add up to a serious amount of downtime for my site.
One way to determine how easy a platform is to use is to visit their support site and perform a search. “How Do I Back-up my WordPress Site?” will direct you to the directions for their users, and may also reveal commentary from users as well. If you see a lot of disgruntled chat on a topic of concern for you, it’s probably an indication to keep looking. GreenGeeks engage in fabulous environmental practices, but their back-up and restoration procedures looked daunting to me.
Automatic updates to PHP is another task that must be performed, preferably not by me! PHP is the open-source programming language used to create WordPress, and updates are essential for security reasons and to optimize site performance. For GreenGeeks the latest stable version will be provided upon install, but whether security updates are automatic or not I could not determine. iPage leaves PHP updates to the user, which looked like a pretty complicated process. HostPapa keeps PHP updated for you, as does DreamHost. It is likely that A2 Hosting does as well, but I wasn’t able to confirm that. The chat function on their site doesn’t apply to technical support, and I couldn’t find an answer in their knowledge base. However their “Managed WordPress” plans are pretty comprehensive so I’d be surprised if they expected users to update PHP themselves.
What about SSL certificates? I’ve learned they need to be kept up to date, but what the heck are they? If you’ve ever came across one of those “this site is not secure” messages when visiting a website, that’s often due to an expired SSL certificate. An SSL certificate encrypts the data exchanged between a user and a website, and ensures the connection is secure. It also confirms the identity of the website. If your SSL certificate expires, you can no longer perform secure transactions on your site and you’ll be downgraded by all the major search engines, relegating your website to the bottom of a pile of search results. So when it comes to SSL management, you not only need to keep the certificate updated, but WordPress needs to be enabled for SSL. All five of the Green Hosts I researched will keep your certificate updated, at least in their managed models. From what I can tell the only one that requires you to manually enable WordPress for SSL was iPage. The other services – GreenGeeks, HostPapa, A2 Hosting and DreamHost- don’t have any instructions on their support sites about enabling WordPress for SSL, so I assume they handle it for you.
And last but not least; what about keeping WordPress updated? That’s something that all five options will automatically do for you.
So which one did I pick? I went with A2 Hosting. They aren’t as green as GreenGeeks, but they’ve still got respectable green chops (see above) plus they offer a WordPress managed plan for only $11.99 per month. There are cheaper options out there, but I’m willing to trade a little cash for time and peace of mind. A managed plan saves me hours spent digging through support documents trying to figure out how to manually restore my site, or enable WordPress for my SSL certificate or any number of other tasks not in my wheelhouse. DreamHost and HostPapa also offer managed plans, but A2 Hosting’s green policies are stronger than DreamHosts and the price tag is less than HostPapa’s.
So now with my hosting company decided and my blogging software at hand, it’s time to get started! Thanks for sticking with me. If you’re curious about the next step in this adventure, be sure to come back soon!
Photo by roderick Sia on Unsplash
