On Tuesday, Grid hosting platform developer 3Tera announced that it had launched its Grid University program, which will provide more than 30 online courses designed to provide interactive education on utility computing for Web applications. The sessions began this week, held Tuesdays at 4:00 p.m. PST and Fridays at 10:00 a.m. PST, for free. They cover material in three categories: general knowledge, grid usage and grid maintenance.

Along with the educational program, this week saw the launch of several new green hosting initiatives.

On Monday, we reported on the launch of The Green Grid, a global non-profit organization focused on reducing power and cooling demands in data centers. The group is now in operation, accepting new members for a fee. Joining the organization enables access to the group's technical input, IP licensing and participation in group events, and in some cases a role in drafting technical documents. The group is also providing white papers on guidelines for energy efficient data centers and metrics that can be used for measuring efficiency in the short term.

On Tuesday, Canadian Web hosting provider BlueFur.com announced that it had begun a carbon neutral program that will see the company plant one tree annually for each server it operates. The company is working with a service in Canada to determine the number of trees needed to balance its greenhouse gas emissions. BlueFur says it will continue the carbon neutral program indefinitely and will look for other ways to become environmentally friendly.

Along with the new developments in educational and environmental programs, the expansion of data center space continued this week.

On Monday, Web hosting provider Hosting.com announced that it had added a second data center in Louisville, Kentucky, where its corporate headquarters is located. The new data center will provide 16,500 square feet of data center space. The company also operates a data center in Irvine, California and another facility in Louisville, which it plans to continue operating following the launch of the new facility in June.

And on Tuesday, colocation provider TelecityRedbus announced that it had developed four new facilities in its main markets of London, Amsterdam and Paris. The new developments cost ?20 million, and add 34,000 square feet of high-density managed hosting space to TelecityRedbus's European footprint. The company says the expansion is part of an aggressive investment plan that will continue through the year.

On Thursday, colocation and Web hosting provider Zogmo announced that it had created the HoustonIX public peering fabric in the Houston, Texas metropolitan area. The company says the project is the first public peering network in the Houston area, home to several of the world's largest data centers. The peering fabric will enable service providers in Houston to exchange Internet traffic at a neutral point.

This week saw the continuation of the current explosion of data center space, a trend that will no doubt continue into the coming weeks, but perhaps more notable to the Web hosting rank and file was the launch of 3Tera's free educational program, which will be accessible to hosting providers in the weeks to come.