Humans love to spend money on a good cause, especially if the purchase was already something they wanted. With web hosting prices often being fairly competitive with each other, factors such as customer service and reliability trump the petty differences in price in most cases. Because of this, many web hosting services have resorted to organized online PR efforts, company blogging, or many different marketing angles to try and distinguish themselves from their competitors.

That’s where ThinkHost comes in. ThinkHost was a web hosting company started by a group of people, rather than one man (which most companies will always call “visionary”). The group of founders are actually the employees, so if any profits are to be had, it would be shared amongst the employees themselves, rather than a venture capitalist or bank. However, those employees claim contentedness with salaries, giving a substantial portion of their profits to charitable groups. Their concern for environmental issues has lead ThinkHost to become a “green web hosting” company. While “green web hosting” has become a hot new trend right now, ThinkHost takes it to the extreme. Not only are their services backed by 100% renewable energies, but even their offices are powered by renewable energy. Many other green web hosting companies simply cover their servers. Yet ThinkHost doesn’t stop there: ThinkHost will also plant a tree for every single one of their clients. That’s a big promise, should ThinkHost ever become as big as the current industry leader 1&1 hosting, that would mean over seven and a half million trees would be planted. With the annual turnover of canceled and new subscribers, millions more could be planted.

ThinkHost also takes it’s environmental approach one step beyond what any other web host can claim: that they aren’t being leeched off of by a polluting bank or venture capitalist. ThinkHost’s money is shared amongst the original founders, who are environmentally concerned. Whereas most web hosting companies were started on loans from banks, or are a publicly traded stock. In either scenario, those profiting from the web host, would probably not be such environmental idealists. ThinkHost might be the only web hosting company that doesn’t have polluting profiteers. ThinkHost customers can rest assured that there are no corporate fat cats in their offices.

So ThinkHost’s marketing angle consists of who they are: a web hosting company consisting of regular people who are concerned about global issues like the environment, poverty, hunger, and world peace. A company that has no corporate fat cat leeching off of them and polluting all over the world in his gas-guzzling corporate jet. That’s the ThinkHost marketing point, and considering the impact they are making on the web hosting community, this marketing tactic, if it can be called anything other than who they are, might just give ThinkHost the edge.