• Tuesday, 25 August 2009 01:12
• Written by Dan Knauss

Up to 2009-10 I was aware of only one "true green" host--AISO.net--and I think they are likely still the greenest, but the more others emerge and grow, the better. (AISO stands for "Affordable Internet Services Online," a little redundant, but what they hey.) AISO was the first public data center member of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), which sets the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards. Somehow I missed them until late 2008. They have a ton of information on their site about their virtually off-the-grid operation, which is what I mean by "true green." They make their own juice with solar panels.

As a 13 year-old family business, AISO has a folksy feel when you're dealing with them--something most users seem to like. In the pre-sales stage and thereafter, they are quick to reply to emails in a friendly, non-corporate way, and they say they actually pick up the phone if someone calls. Others confirm this is the case. "They" is usually the head guy, Phil Nail.

AISO is the Real Deal

AISO is located in one of the sunniest parts of the world (Romoland, California) and is 100% self-powered on their own solar array. That is what makes them unique and "true green," which they have been since 2001--totally self-solar-powered. (Their emergency backup generator burns propane.)

AISO is in the process of acquiring LEED certification for their data center. This involves a lot of physical improvements, like installing a green roof, a fully self-contained, water-based cooling system with its own solar array, and a rainwater collection/storage system. AISO has high-efficiency, virtualized servers and green office systems like LED lighting and solar tubes.

These facts of the AISO infrastructure in themselves are enough to make them the choice for a number of businesses--really anything related to the "green economy." It's great branding, great marketing, and with AISO, it's not hype.

Why Green Hosting Matters

I already mentioned the realistic/pragmatic/cynical reason--the clean, green image makes you look cool, and it is cool. It is also a good thing for everyone on the planet.

SolarEnergyHost (an AISO reseller) has some figures on pollution and energy use caused by web hosting data centers that should be a big and increasing concern. ("How Green is the Internet?") In a similar vein, GreenestHost's CEO (another AISO reseller) has a worthwhile white paper called "Greening the Internet and Its Environmental Implications: The Case to Reverse a Growing Trend" that you can download. It discusses hidden costs and notes "internet computing power consumption and its reliance on non-renewable sources is now at a point where an second life avatar (a digital representation of one’s self in the 3D virtual world at SecondLife.com) actually contributes more atmospheric pollution annually than a real citizen in Brazil. Imagine: the digital representation of you may be doing more harm to the environment than the real world you!"

AISO has a lot of room for growth

On the downside, AISO is mainly shared hosting warmed over, and it is not competitive for price on any level--features and support are all less than you'd get with one of the better big discount hosts. Highly expensive dedicated virtual server packages are avalable, starting at $150/mo.

My experience is only with the low-end Eco-I and Eco-II packages. Despite some unexplained claims of "Joomla, Wordpress, and Drupal support" on their site, the Eco-I plan does not include a mySQL, Postgres, or any other database which these applications require.

I'm not sure what anyone would do with the Eco-I. Out of the box the Eco-II plan used to cause the most frustrating kinds of permission problems with Joomla, but that should be fixed now. The server control interface is Plesk, and for some reason is disconnected from PHPmyAdmin. You now get three pre-established mySQL databases with the Eco-II plan, but you don't have total control over them or the database users. You are limited to what you can do with the myadmin panel.

While AISO is not terribly well-equipped for speedy technical support, they do follow up within hours during the normal business day/week. Previously things were slower. The only negative thing I have read about AISO is a report that their staff were once caught posting reviews of their own services.

With those caveats, AISO is a host I can now recommend and have used for one project involving Wordpress. Earlier this year AISO was not up to snuff for a task this simple without major headaches.

Beware the resellers!

SolarEnergyHost.com and GreenestHost.com both resell AISO's server space and bandwidth while adding other services. Both offer 24/7 email and other tech support; AISO does not. You too can become an AISO reseller

That said, I've never met a reseller that smelled good, or one that I liked or heard anything good about. The point of being a reseller is to charge people more and give them less. At worst, resellers live up to the pitch AISO uses--be a reseller "without the need to know how to manage a server." In that case, a reseller is a useless middleman who is going to cause you problems, add no value, and charge you more for something you could get for less elsewhere. SolarEnergyHost and GreenestHost aren't that unethical--they are a value-added proposition with their 24/7 email and phone support.

Update: As of October 2009, GreenestHost is currently not taking any new customers and says it is only taking support requests by email--replies are promised within 24 hours. SolarEnergyHost has had a rocky road but still appears operational.

SolarEnergyHost goes a little further than AISO with their greenness; they say they "donate five dollars from each account to the ‘Gardens of Hope’ Project." This money goes toward :the planting of one tree and helps link five communities in Lesotho, southern Africa, into a network of projects that share ideas, skills, resources and common purpose while supporting the educational needs of orphaned and vulnerable children." That's all very well and good; how is SolarEnergyHost as a host?

SolarEnergyHost offers more and charges less than AISO. (Did I mention they're a reseller?) They also claim to specialize in Joomla support--a claim I found severely lacking early this year. (More on this below.) Some of SolarEnergyHost's shared server accounts run suPHP which takes care of common permission problems with PHP/mySQL applications like Joomla while also creating a more secure environment. AISO may also have adopted this practice by now as well. Other than that, my trial with SolarEnergyHouse was an unmitigated disaster. They had--and subsequently had more--catastrophic failures. If their "CEO," Aaron Handford, is not a one man band, he may be in over his head.

I absolutely disrecommend SolarEnergyHost. If you're reading this in 2010 or beyond and SolarEnergyHost is still going, maybe they have improved. In early 2009 I found SolarEnergyHost's custom version of Parallels Plesk (really designed for reseller accounts) to be absolute hell to work with, along with their lack of readiness to support Joomla. There were some unique problems at SolarEnergyHost involved in working with multiple, externally hosted domains, or with working without a domain. This is probably why they have dumped Plesk for cPanel, which is probably an improvement. But they also had a bad service outages, low quality (and slow) support during the brief period I tried them out. They've had more since that time.

My expectation is that "Joomla support" at SolarEnergyHost (or anywhere) means that new accounts are configured optimally for Joomla, or that users can opt for a Joomla configuration when they buy a hosting package. It also means that basic failures in fresh installations of Joomla should not happen, and tech support people should not be puzzled by basic problems in Joomla. None of this turned out to be true. A good, basic server configuration for Joomla would involve several things SolarEnergyHost was not doing, like offering only the latest version release of Joomla in the auto-installer, not a version that is two releases behind with known vulnerabilities.

Other problems at SolarEnergyHost concerned PHP default settings: display_errors was on, open_basedir was off, expose_php was on, and error logging by default goes to error_log. Also, safe mode is on by default when new domain accounts are created--a sub-optimal strategy for security on shared hosting. This will cause problems for Joomla, mainly by stopping it from writing to files. So safe_mode should be off with disable_functions used to take out a custom list of unnecessary functions.