I was first skeptical about their green policy (in fact, I acted sort of rude and asked for certification and proofs). However truth is, the hosting company had just purchased over 2.3 million MW of renewable energy in March 2009 and websites hosted at Green Geeks are 300% clean powered
Sound interesting? Well then you gotta check out the man behind all these – Trey Gardner. Trey Gardner is no-stranger to most experienced webmaster as he had been working for over a decade with some of the big names in hostingindustry. His experience in web hosting and web development is valuable and I’m glad to see important people like Gardner is picking up their responsibility in protecting our environment.
Without any further delay, here’s my online interview with Trey Gardner of GreenGeeks and TigerSites.
Q&A with GreenGeeks CEO, Trey Gardner
Hello Trey, thanks for your time with us. To get things started, let’s go with the intro. What can we know more about ‘Trey Gardner’? Can you brief us more about your background in the industry?
Thank you for allowing me to introduce myself.
I have been in the web hosting business for over ten years and another 2 years in the web site design and online marketing business in addition to my years in web hosting*. I have held positions with a number of large web hosting companies including; General Manager, Director of Marketing, Reseller Program Director, Sales Director and Quality Assurance Director. I have built; reseller programs, quality assurance protocols, support teams, marketing initiatives, sales teams and I have held management positions in all but server administration areas within a web hosting company.
Some fun quick questions about yourself: Do you have a dog? Are you a PC, or MAC guy? IE or FireFox? :)
I do have a dog, a 115 pound chocolate lab named Guinness, I use a PC, I prefer Firefox over IE. I grew up in a beach town so I surf and play volleyball and I love to go skiing in the wintertime.
Okay, back to business. Both TigerSites and GreenGeeks are new names in the hosting industry. Can you tell us more about them?
Green Geeks was my vision a few years back, I had been working for another web hosting company and saw that the industry was just starting to move to become more eco friendly. I read some horrifying news about just how much of a carbon polluter our industry was and I wanted to make a difference. The web host I was the general manager of at the time saw this as a good marketing scheme but nothing more and they decided to do the minimal they could to become green so that they could come out as a “Green” web host.
At that time I was ready to branch off on my own and I decided to build my own web hosting company. I knew plenty of top talent in the industry and I wanted to really have the focus toward pushing our industry to become more eco friendly and Greener. I decided on the Brand Green Geeks.
After a year of fairly steady growth but still underachieving in some of the areas that I wanted to push into like our reseller program I partnered with an old colleague who owned the TigerSites brand. We formed a partnership earlier this year and it has been great. He and I balance our skill sets very well and the partnership has allowed us to push into the reseller area of web hosting as well as dedicated servers. We have more plans for additional offerings down the line as well.
What can we know about the web servers? Where does your data center located at?
Our datacenter is located in Chicago, IL and is one of the Greenest data facilities in North America. This state of the art facility is equipped with raised floors, climate control, fire suppression systems, 24/7 security, UPS & generators and water detection systems, to ensure that our customers data is safe and secure.
We buy state of the art high quality fuel efficient Intel Quad core processors with RAID 10 storage arrays, 4 GB DDR2/DDR3 Memory and 100Mpbs connection to the Switches. Multi-gig connectivity to our network’s edge routers. Unlike some other web hosts we also do not overload customers onto our servers, we like things to run efficiently here and my past experiences has shown me when you overload your servers bad things happen, like multiple downtimes. We make sure that our environment is living up to our 99.9% uptime.
You are doing a great job at GreenGeeks and I don’t see any green hosting companies come close in term of “Green Factor”*. How do you achieve that? Does the green policy damage the company’s balance sheet?
