Yet another web hosting company has jumped on the green web hosting bandwagon today. FatCow’s green web hosting service will be yet one of many in a recent trend of web hosts to join the “green” community.

Paul Bukhovko, the Marketing Manager at FatCow said, “We’re offsetting all of our electricity use by purchasing wind-generated Renewable Energy Certificates, providing our customers with an environmentally preferable web hosting solution.”

Basically FatCow will be using the REC method, renewable energy credits, where they basically pay out whatever it would cost to generate their electricity into wind, so that some company may convert that amount down the line. It’s NOT really powering themselves with wind, but NONE of the current web hosting offerings that I’m aware of are literally using wind generators.

At this point it’s so cheap to buy these RECs that the added marketing benefit outweighs the cost. A “environmental” consulting firm has been going around convincing board executives of this (the ones behind DreamHost and Hostgator’s green switch). This time it’s a different company, Community Energy, Inc. (CEI) which seems to be the mastermind behind convincing FatCow as well.

Really it’s all just good marketing. I say customers should just pick the best web hosting service possible, whether it is green web hosting or not. If you are one of the global warming crazies, then just calculate the “carbon footprint” of your services and pay for the offsets yourself, and keep the superior web host’s customer service.