GreenGeeks and HostPapa are two green hosting providers keeping a commitment to the environment. As both of them lay claim to being the best green hosting company, we make this comparison to figure out which is the better choice by analyzing their green methods as well as some aspects that matter to hosting experience, such as uptime, speed, control panel and support.
Commitment of Being Green – Both Good
GreenGeeks and HostPapa adopt the same green method – purchasing green energy credits. By doing so, they try to offset the carbon footprint of their data centers. However, the difference is that HostPapa purchases credits equaling to 100% of the power they consume, while GreenGeeks buys 300% – that is why the company says they are 300% green.
Besides the green energy credits, which are purchased from EPA Green Power, GreenGeeks has also made other efforts to make their services greener, such as:
- building each server to be energy efficient and keeping all servers up-to-date.
- recycling old servers for internal uses.
- maintaining a remote workforce.
What Does GreenGeeks Do Better Than HostPapa?
According to trials and reviews, we find that GreenGeeks does better mainly in price value, performance and real-time support.
Better cost-effectiveness
The main product GreenGeeks offers is an all-inclusive green hosting plan named EcoSite Starter. The plan is regularly priced from $4.95/mo, but there is a 20%-off promotion available now which can bring the price down to $3.96/mo. You can enjoy the promotion by clicking the promotional link below.
Besides, GreenGeeks has prepared two upgrade solutions for EcoSite Starter on the shared hosting level. If you want more advanced solutions, VPS and dedicated servers are also purchasable.
HostPapa has three shared hosting solutions named Starter, Business and Business Pro. During the current promotion, the prices of the plans start from $2.95/mo, $5.95/mo and $12.95/mo, up to 51% off the regular $5.99/mo, $9.99/mo and $18.99/mo.
When comparing the primary plans – GreenGeeks EcoSite Starter and HostPapa Starter, you will find that the latter is cheaper than the former. However, we don't think the latter is more worth a try because it has higher renewal price, and fewer features.
Much better uptime
GreenGeeks and HostPapa do not operate any data center by themselves. Instead, they house their servers in some carefully-selected third party data centers. As far as we know, all the data centers the two web hosts rely on are highly available, backed by backup power, diesel generators, 24x7 security and full network redundancy.
However, our monitoring shows that GreenGeeks has been delivering much better uptime as HostPapa cannot get its commitment of 99.9% uptime covered in some months. You can see GreenGeeks uptime in the last 30 days in the chart below.
The recent uptime records of HostPapa are as below.
Faster server response & page loads
At present, GreenGeeks offers three data center locations including Chicago and Phoenix in the US, and Toronto in Canada. Powered by the network gear from Cisco and Juniper, the data centers can well ensure good speed for most locations in North America. In addition, another data center location – Amsterdam, NL – is expected to be available soon.
To offer fast servers, GreenGeeks purchases Supermicro servers with Intel Xeon processors, and equips every server with SSDs, RAID 10 and 64 GB DDR3 memory. Besides, since the company is a CloudFlare partner, you are able to use a free CDN to gain better speed.
HostPapa also adopts CloudFlare CDN, which is good. But the company does not offer any information about the server specifications and network. The only piece of information available is that its primary data center is located in Toronto, Canada.
For a straight-forward comparison, we'd like to present the server response records of the two web hosts in below.
More responsive real human being support
GreenGeeks and HostPapa offer the same support methods – phone, email, tickets, and live chat. However, the fact is that the support staff of the former web host is much more responsive.
Phone calls are picked up immediately; live chat is usually responded within seconds, and tickets are replied within an average of 20 minutes. GreenGeeks is indeed among the few web hosts with the fastest support.
Read:Rss Feedbacks And Importance Of Their Submission
HostPapa Edge in Shared Hosting – The Care for Customers
HostPapa values customer satisfaction, too, so it has tried much to improve its technical support and customer service. Although the company is not as responsive as GreenGeeks, it is doing well in:
- offering a 30-minute training session for free for new customers. those who sign up with hostpapa for the first time can have a one-on-one session with an expert to learn about hostpapa tools and services. note that this service is a paid option in starter.
- offering multilingual support, including english, spanish, french and german. pay attention that multilingual support is not available through phone.
Read:What Makes a Website Credible – 13 Tips You Must Take to Increase Trust
The Verdict – GreenGeeks Wins the Competition
From the comparison above, you can see GreenGeeks is undoubtedly the winner. It is not only green, but also reliable, fast, and responsive in support. More importantly, you can get more resources and features at a low price. If you are interested, just try its offerings risk-freely.
You should still pay attention to how much carbon footprint you are giving off.
Here are the tips that can help: Consider going electric with your transportationGo electric.
You consume so much energy when you’re only going on short trips.
There are also electric bikes now for people who are not confident with their ability to bike long distances.
Electric bikes have assistive functions that make it easier to get to where you want to go.
Bring reusable water containers and utensils How often do you buy bottled water whenever you go out?
