Guidance Offers Green Hosting for eCommerce Websites

Guidance (http://www.Guidance.com), which helps online retailers achieve market domination by creating captivating and engaging online shopping experiences, today announced that it is now providing its clients with hosting solutions that are 100 percent carbon-neutral.

The move will not require any upgrades or additional investment on the client's part. It's a new standard practice for Guidance - the latest in a series of changes undertaken over the past year to help the company achieve its goal of operating as an environmentally aware, carbon-neutral company.

To reduce overall energy use, Guidance bought and is now using energy-efficient servers and processors to host its clients' websites: HP's energy-optimized ProLiant(R) servers (DL360 G5 and DL380 G5), with the low-voltage Quad-Core Intel(R) Xeon(R) Processor L5420. Guidance also is moving to more virtualization in the company's development environment to reduce internal energy consumption.

Guidance has successfully offset all of its remaining electricity-related CO2 emissions from its servers by purchasing renewable energy credits (RECs) through BeGreen Business, the carbon offset brand of Green Mountain Energy. The credits are made from wind and biomass sources located throughout the United States, helping avoid an average of more than 52,500 pounds of CO2 emissions annually.

This has the equivalent environmental benefit of not driving a car roughly 58,500 miles, or of recycling almost 130,000 aluminum cans and more than 21,000 pounds of newspaper.

"We're giving online retailers an easy way to embrace green hosting," said Jon Provisor, Guidance co-owner and CTO. "We've been working for more than a year now to make our business operate in a more sustainable, environmentally responsible way. We're especially excited about this achievement, because it's something we can offer our clients - making sustainability a shared effort." Data centers account for 1.5 percent to 3 percent of electricity consumption in the United States, according to CIO Magazine's special report, "Green is Better." A recent report by Stanford University researcher Jonathan Koomey says worldwide energy consumption for servers, cooling equipment and related infrastructure doubled from 2000 to 2005, and could nearly double again by 2010 - unless companies make a concerted effort for change.

Guidance has significantly reduced its overall consumption of electricity as a result of a company-wide commitment to sustainable business practices, which Guidance shares in detail in the Green Toolkit offered here. For 2007, Guidance's purchase of renewable energy credits offset 100 percent of the carbon emissions associated with its business activities.

About BeGreen
Carbon Offsets BeGreen Carbon Offsets (www.begreennow.com) is a division of Green Mountain Energy Company, the longest serving green power provider in the U.S. BeGreen provides education about the serious effects of harmful carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and offers businesses and consumers simple and effective ways to reduce their carbon footprint through the purchase of renewable energy, forest sequestration and other project-based offsets. BeGreen's carbon calculators follow the EPA Climate Leaders methodology, which is based on the World Resources Institute's Greenhouse Gas Protocol (WRI GHG), a widely accepted industry standard. All purchases and sales of BeGreen's carbon offset projects are also verified by an independent auditing firm to ensure their quality and effectiveness.

About Guidance
Since 1993, Guidance (www.guidance.com) has helped companies seize opportunities and solve problems through the innovative and practical use of technology. Guidance designs, builds and maintains eCommerce websites for retailers that are pure-play online or multi-channel - creating captivating experiences so consumers will buy more, come back often and value greater engagement with the retailer. Guidance software systems facilitate $500 million in online sales every year. Members of the Guidance team are seasoned professionals, passionately committed to providing technical leadership and powering ingenuity.