Many nonprofit offices have one or more servers managing file sharing, backups, database access, email, website or more. These machines tend to be high on the energy consumption scale, employing multiple hard drives, power supplies, fans and more. As the energy efficiency of individual computer components continues to improve, the energy costs of these computers will probably go down, although this will likely be overshadowed by rising energy prices.

Except for an organization that is managing its email, website and other systems on in-house servers, every nonprofit is using a hosted server for one or more critical services--web, email, database, etc. When the energy and support costs are factored in, maintaining in-house servers can easily be a big cost center for an organization although these costs are certainly justified for many groups. One way to quickly size up the energy costs of your servers or any equipment is to plug in a nifty product called a Kill-a-Watt energy monitoring device that will tell you exactly how much electricity a particular electronic gadget uses and how much it costs to run that gadget each year. Add up all those costs and moving email, web hosting, backup and other services to an outside provider could make financial and organizational sense.

But does it make sense from an energy conservation standpoint? Data centers--huge facilities with hundreds or thousands of servers, power supplies, back up power supplies and more--use enormous amounts of energy. While improvements in power management and the energy conservation of server components will continue to improve, there is a reason companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are building new data centers in places like Eastern Oregon and Washington that offer access to relatively reliable hydro-power (supplemented by growing wind farms). Still, recent reports, like one from IT analyst firm IDC, suggests that at least for larger organizations, using outsourced, data center-based services makes financial and environmental sense. And, with energy costs going up, it makes financial sense for the companies to get every ounce of efficiency from their data centers.