iHost is a green web hosting company right from its tagline, which says “Powered by the wind and sun”. It has a strong ethics base and believing strongly in environmental protection, peace and various other Gandhian values. Website hosting services for small business.
It provides the carbon- neutral web hosting as a battle against global warming and environment degradation. The electricity it uses is 100% powered by renewable energy sources, such as the wind and the sun, which they obtain by purchasing 100% Green certified Renewable Energy Credits or RECs. It also follows green practices at the office, such as, reducing the use of paper by storing data electronically, recycling and using recycled products. It also makes use of energy efficient notebooks and low wattage lighting, further reducing the electrical requirement. It promotes telecommuting (using public transportation or bicycles for commute). It even has gone to the extent of planting a new tree with every new client it gets! That is quite some green marketing for a green web hosting company!
iHost has taken on much more social responsibilities than just being green. Its work ethics includes promoting peace and equality. Therefore, it does not discriminate based on color, creed, age or religion while employing people. Rather it looks at merits and makes sure their employees feel appreciated and valued. It actively supports non-profit organizations and progressive companies. This is done by providing free hosting to environmental organizations and discounted hosting to non-profit organizations.
Moving on to its services, it provide just one plan called the Green II plan priced at $7.95 per month. This plan includes unlimited disk space, unlimited data transfer, unlimited MySQL databases, unlimited domains, free shopping cart, free photo gallery and various other multi-media and blogging features. With this plan, it also provides the customers with bonus softwares and tools, a $400 value bonus, along with free web design templates and a site builder! It provides a strong support for all leading Web technologies, such as PHP, MySQL, Microsoft FrontPage and PERL. The data centers are completely backed up by UPS power to ensure uninterrupted performance.
Although iHost provides 100% Uptime and 24/7 monitoring, its support system is a little poor with offering just a Ticket System. It has tried to compensate that by putting Support FAQ on the website. Its back up is the 14 day Money back Guarantee, i.e., an unsatisfied customer can get full refund within 14 days of purchase, which is a very small time compared to time offered by many other green web hosting service providers.
While it has a very strong environmental base, the prices and customer support weakens it and it will need to improve them a lot if it wants to survive in the very competitive market of green web hosting.