Environmental | Tiger Technologies Support

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Is your company environmentally friendly or "green"? Are you "carbon neutral"?

Our business runs on electricity, which obviously has environmental consequences. We’re concerned about pollution, energy security, and climate change, so we’re taking steps to make sure that our company is as environmentally friendly as possible.

The most important things we do are save energy where possible, support renewable power, and offset our carbon emissions to make sure that our company is carbon neutral. In fact, as we explain below, our business is completely powered by renewable energy. We think this makes Tiger Technologies one of your best choices if you’re concerned about the environment.

First things first: saving energy where possible

Saving energy is an obvious step. Efficiency is one of the most important factors when we buy servers and manage loads. Between 2020 and 2023, we reduced our overall data center energy usage by 17%, even though we serve more customers.

Supporting renewable power and offsetting carbon emissions

No matter how much we save, all web hosting companies use quite a bit of energy. Powering and cooling servers takes lots of electricity. Each year, our business directly consumes about 55,000 kWh (kilowatt hours) of electricity (this includes server consumption, data center cooling, and energy use for employees).

That’s a heavy environmental impact. Instead of ignoring it, we’re doing something about it. Each year, we contribute to the Bonneville Environmental Foundation renewable energy program to offset 200% of that.

The Bonneville Environmental Foundation uses the money to fund zero-emission wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass renewable energy programs, either through direct investments or through renewable energy certificates (aka “green tags”). The projects are certified by the independent organization Green-e. You can verify this at the Green Web Foundation.

These contributions make our business carbon neutral — more than “neutral”, in fact, because we try to offset (reduce) twice the greenhouse gases we produce. The offset payments ensure that new renewable electricity is pumped into the standard reliable electricity grid.

Why doesn’t Tiger Technologies just put solar panels on the roof?

A practical answer is that it’s very difficult to get to 100% reliability on a small scale using wind, solar and batteries. You want your website to work no matter what.

Also, though, it’s more cost effective and better for the environment to build a large energy farm in a part of North America that otherwise uses coal to generate electricity than it is to build a small local system in our state that already has relatively high renewable usage.

So while we don’t have solar panels or windmills directly on our roof, our Bonneville Environmental Foundation contributions make sure we’re generating more renewable energy than we use (and in fact, more renewable energy than if we didn’t exist at all).

By the way, we know that some people are skeptical of carbon offsets and energy certificates. They do work, though. For example, the electrical grid operator in California is legally required to buy renewable energy if it’s available at market rates — the problem is that it usually costs more. The certificates pay generators the difference between “dirty” and “clean” power generation costs, making it possible for them to sell clean renewable power at dirty market rates. Every clean kilowatt funded by a renewable energy certificate really does mean one less dirty kilowatt in the grid.