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http://www.solarhost.co.uk/ seems priced competitively with the rest of the shared virtual hosting business.

http://www.solarhost.com/ looks like it is extremely unreliable.

It is sort of nice to have an option to http://www.aiso.net/.

OK, I can comment a little bit on this. First of all, there is a hosting company that claims to run entirely on renewable energy (solar, wind, they don't get to specific on their site), SolarHost.com. I've never used them, only read about them.

As for running on solar power (or wind), what you want to consider to start with is how much power the box draws, and how long it will run. The best thing you can do is conserve what you can; it will save you on overall system cost. If it's a workstation, pick one just as big as you need, and don't go overboard. (I'm typing this on my dual AMD MP box, which yes is overkill. But in case anyone's interested, with both CPUs at 100 % doing some Maya rendering among other things, it draws about 250 watts.) A server is the same way, but you'll usually want to leave it on all the time. You can take many conservation measures, like making it a headless box and minimizing the hardware involved. My Gentoo Web/Mail/MySQL server at home is a 1 GHz Via board with 256 MB Ram, and the 12 volt car power supply. All I have connected to the board is a hard drive; I disconnected the CD-ROM when I was done installing. At 12 volts, it draws roughly 30-36 watts (~3 amps).

Going the 12 volt route is nice, because then you don't need an inverter to power the box. Assuming it draws 35 watts 24 hours/day, that comes out to 840 watt-hours a day (you get watt-hours by multiplying watts by hours). Obviously, we're going to want to use a battery so our server can run at night. So, we multiply by 1.2 to compensate for the power lost here, and get 1008 watt-hours (1.008 KWH). Now, assuming we want to do this entirely with solar, we need to figure out how much sun is available in the area. Go here to figure out how many hours of sun you get a day. Where I am, in New York State, we get an average of 2.5-3 sun hours a day throughout the year (keep in mind, this is "full sun" so the panels will be putting out power at different light levels, though well stick with this figure of the sun hours). Let's use 2.5 sun hours to be safe. To produce 1008 watt-hours, we divide 1008 by 2.5. The result is that I would need 403.2 watts of solar panels. Four of these will be about right, putting out 115 watts each or about 460 watts, leaving a bit of a buffer. The price of the panels alone would be $2,060. You'd need batteries next, with enough capacity for, let's say, 3 days without sun. That means they have to be able to hold 3.024 KWH at 12 volts, or 252 amp-hours (3,024 watt-hours divided by 12 volts). If we drain the battery (assuming a deep-cycle led-acid battery) down all the way, we'll damage it. The minimum should be 20 percent. To make sure they last long, however, we should go with something more along the lines of, say, 35 %. That means we should plan for a battery bank with a capacity of about 390 amp-hours. A pair of the L-16 HCs found here should work. Then you'd need a charge controller of about 50 or 60 amps. Not including wiring, labor, fusing, shipping, or the server itself, the cost comes to about $3,116. This is to run a 35 watt load 24 hours a day.

Believe it or not, small-scale renewable energy is in fact quite popular. A lot can be done with the power generated by that system; you could probably run a small apartment with it (assuming no heat with electricity, and that said apartment does not contain the server :-)). Most people don't run a server all the time, so something like this works out. Running an average-sized house, after some slight conservation (not using electricity for heat, using compact floursecent lights and LEDs, and just remembering to turn stuff off when not using it), the total is usually about $20,000 to $30,

You can't power an entire server farm with solar power,

Though I don't know how many servers they have there is a company that runs their webservers on solar, SolarHost.com. It's a matter of available space and how much you want to spend to configure a solar system.

Eventually green power will be cheaper than fossil fuel power, as green power prices are only falling and fossil fuels will only rise in price. At that point I think we'll start seeing a lot of businesses start to take a serious look at green power. Business as a whole will never be ecologically minded until it is more profitable to do so.

Quite a few businesses with more going into it are involved in not just solar power but other alternative energy sources. Heck I just googled "solar" and "power" and BP Solar got top ad placement. Then again BP Solar is one of the top solar panel makers. Because of the number of results I added "energy" and still got more than 28,000 results. Adding "electricity" returned almost 10,000.

The mini reminds me of a friend who used an old 68k macintosh as a webserver. her desktop was plugged into mains power but the little web server only used 17w of power to run all day every day, and was on a solar power setup with battery backup. last time I heard from her it had gone down from lack of power only twice in a year.

There's a hosting company that runs on solar power, Solar Host.

Solar Host does exactly that.

If you're not interested in running your own alternative-energy IT setup, you can always outsource it:

Solar Hosting uses renewables (i.e. solar, hence the name) to power all their web servers.

Looks like they offer a complete solution package, from web design to hosting.

www.solarhost.com already powers more than a few websites using just the free radiation from that big thing in the sky.

It's already been done to an extent. SolarHost offers web hosting powered by solar power. They are the people providing hosting for The Formula Sun website. (Formula Sun, incidentally, is a group of races across the USA in various solar powered vehicles. Shameless Plug)

Joshua

Terradot

solarhost.com is running Microsoft-IIS4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98

It would be much cooler to be running on Sun Servers instead though... ("We run Sun off the sun!") Thats why I just had to check.
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And here I always thought power plants produced electricity.. Well, I guess this is a good thing and all, but computers aren't exactly very power-hungry.. According to Alternative Power Systems, a home computer consumes 80-150 W/hr, which isn't much compared to air conditioning, electric heating, the light bulbs in your home, etc..

To make a difference with things like this, they need to suply power to a lot more than a small set of low-consumption computers. I seriously suspect these people of being more interested in doing CGI programming at 75$/hr than protecting the environment.. Besides, they're not even running Solaris :)

What we need are huge solar panels in space and wireless transmission of power down here to juice the stuff that eats a bit more than the websites.. But I guess that's not as profitable as selling "Powered by the sun" stickers to e-businesses ;)
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office under contruction