Here at Venture Domain Hosting, we pride ourselves on being environmentally responsible and, since our founding in 1999, we have worked hard to keep our operations efficient and to limit our impact on the environment. We also understand we can't eliminate that impact, so we work with several organizations to counter what we can't avoid.

For every new hosting account at Venture Domain Hosting we will plant one tree! We spent a lot of time researching other options for offsetting our impact, including Renewable Energy Certificates, and feel like we've made the right choice. Lots of other companies are offsetting some of their energy use with RECs. At this point, however, the effectiveness of those certificates is unclear, and the purchaser's actual energy use is still almost entirely generated by greenhouse gas producing fossil fuels. If better REC options and/or new options for purchasing renewable energy become available to us, we will eagerly take another look.

In the mean time, the trees we're planting have a clear and cumulative effect on the environment and on greenhouse gas levels. The average tree inhales 26 lbs of carbon dioxide per year and exhales enough oxygen for a family of four for a year. Trees also reflect solar radiation back into space and increase cloud cover, both of which help counteract global warming. We have partnered with MokuGift and the UN Environment Program for this project. Planting trees through these groups has the added benefit of teaching sustainable agriculture in impoverished parts of the world.

All of our systems are designed around a remote workforce which is the greenest possible option for a company. This means that we have no office or computer equipment to heat, cool, and light year round. Perhaps even more importantly, none of our employees ever have to drive to work. Our employees work on their own computers and in their own homes, which is far more efficient then having them drive to a separate space and use an additional set of computer equipment.

We are proud to say that we are virtually waste free as a company! Thanks to our remote workforce, we produce none of the waste that comes from a typical office environment. The only waste we haven't eliminated is a small amount of paper which is recycled, and this is due to our bank, and a few other organizations we work with, not being completely paperless yet. Once they go paperless we will not generate any physical waste!

The vast majority of the impact Venture Domain Hosting has on the environment is through the electricity our servers and related equipment use. Luckily for us, with today's energy prices, being green and being cost effective can go hand in hand. We are constantly working to reduce our costs and our impact by leveraging new technologies to lower power consumption, using natural DC cooling technology, and using virtualization software to scale efficiently.