Green hosting: the what and the why
Around 4.6 billion people use the internet every day. As such, the energy requirements of the internet are constantly increasing, with energy consumption often coming from data centres, such as AWS (Amazon Web Services) – a hugely popular data storage platform that hosts around 6% of all the websites on the internet.
You may have seen on the news recently about how the increase in AI models has driven the need for more of these ‘hyperscale’ data centres. This is concerning for a number of reasons, for example: not only do they consume colossal amounts of energy, but the servers need constant cooling. This is usually provided by water cooling towers, sourced from local water supplies, which can have a negative effect on communities near them. But where does the energy required for these massive data centres come from?
“We tend to think of the internet as something ephemeral, but the servers that host all that data produce huge amounts of emissions.” – Jeff Kettle, Senior Lecturer in Electronic Engineering at the University of Glasgow [The Conversation]
TLDR: The internet – and the number of websites it’s made up of – is constantly growing. Green hosting is a way of serving your website online using a provider that gets their energy from renewable energy sources, environmentally friendly practises and carbon offsetting, as a way to improve the global energy consumption crisis.
What is ‘green hosting’?
Your website runs from a website hosting platform that ‘serves’ the data that makes up its content to anyone who visits it. These hosts use data centres and servers to display that content. From the amount of websites on the internet these days, it’s no wonder that the internet’s energy requirements have doubled from only fifteen years ago (2010).
“If the Internet were a country, it would rank fifth in the world for the amount of electricity it needs.” – Greenpeace (5th August 2013)
Green web hosting is a type of internet hosting that relies on renewable energy and other energy conservation methods to store and serve data. This is particularly true for websites. As many businesses attempt to become ‘paperless’ and buy into digitalisation in an effort to reduce consumption of valuable resources, the demand for energy required to store and host data for websites online is exponentially increasing. Therefore, the need for data centres that use more ecologically and environmentally friendly sources of energy consumption is also on the rise.
As well as renewable energy sources, such as wind, water or solar energy, these hosting organisations can offset their carbon emissions through purchasing green certificates (carbon offsetting) – for example: in the UK, these offsetting certification organisations include the Woodland Carbon Code and Peatland Code.
Green hosts can demonstrate their commitment to protecting the environment by acting in a generally environmentally friendly way in their business practises: they might recycle hardware that’s no longer usable in a professional setting; some also participate in the ‘sharing economy,’ whereby goods, services and/or information are shared between users and businesses in a more communal way (peer-to-peer), rather than the usual B2B or B2C models.
Why green hosting should matter to you
Websites are becoming increasingly data hungry, as more content is digitised and stored online. An average website produces 533kg of CO2 per year [IONOS]; as such, some data centres now generate the same amount of CO2 emissions as global airlines [The Next Web]. This means your organisation’s carbon footprint expands with every person that interacts with your website (alongside every other carbon cost that contributes to this). Therefore, ensuring your website is hosted by a green web host is one way to change this for the better.
Making your website fast and efficient from a user’s perspective is essential. Websites can become increasingly bloated as more elements are added, for instance: including a variety of colour styles, Javascript, extra content etc. If you refactor the code, it can make a big difference to its size (in data) and the demand on the hosting infrastructure.
Another aspect of reducing server load is to appropriately size your images; because of the quality of electronics these days – i.e. OLED or other modern high-resolution displays – digital media requires high quality imagery and footage. If your website is full of beautiful, high-resolution photos or video, it’s going to use a lot of data to stream that. To give a demonstration of this, here’s an example: if you increase an image’s size (in dimensions) by a factor of 2, you’re actually quadrupling its data, because it’s essentially taking up the space of 4 of the original image.
Did you know? One hour of video streaming (for example, via Netflix) equates to about as much CO2 as driving 300 miles by car. – [The Guardian]
Why green hosting matters to us
As a business, we’re becoming increasingly concerned about the impact we have not only on global energy use and emissions, but more importantly, the web in general. We’ve already discussed the carbon impact your website has and why that’s important; however, an important factor of that is green hosting. We want the parts of our digital infrastructure that are within our control and influence to use green energy to ensure they’re meeting our sustainability strategy. That’s why we choose to use a hosting provider that’s based on green energy to limit the impact we have on our environment.
Our strategy for improving our sustainability as a business includes:
- Reducing the impact our work in the charity sector has on the environment through educating our clients on how they can improve their own decarbonisation targets and processes.
- Reducing energy waste through optimising performance and removing unnecessary dependencies by refactoring (simplifying) our code to make it more concise and performant. This has assisted in lowering the technical burden on both our own infrastructure (our server and hosting) and the network pipeline for our end users.
- Streamlining our imagery and graphics to reduce the amount of data they use; we also build our products in such a way that we only deliver the content a user is likely to see at that time. We pride ourselves on making our products lean, while maintaining their beauty, effectiveness and functionality.
- As a business, we’re fully remote – this means none of us have a commute and are therefore saving on carbon emissions from the travel necessary to get to an office-based location.
Our commitment to green hosting and what we’ve done so far
Currently, we use a digital infrastructure platform called Katapult that’s run by Krystal hosting. They’re a BCorp and also belong to 1% for the Planet, which makes them the perfect infrastructure provider for us to deliver fantastic web-based products for our clients, while remaining conscious of our impact on the environment.
The Green Web Foundation is an organisation that’s working towards creating a fossil-free internet by 2030. They’re paving the way for tools that reduce the internet’s impact on the world – a cause that very much aligns with our own values. We’d like to acknowledge the great work they do by highlighting their useful tools:
- A green web directory tool that allows people to search within their locality for a green hosting provider.
- A green web check tool that enables you to verify the green energy status of any website, demonstrating whether or not they’re using a green host.
We’re committed to using green energy for our digital hosting infrastructure and have moved 80% of the websites we host to green energy-based hosting platforms so far. Our goal is to move all of our clients’ websites that we host to providers that can verify the power they generate by summer this year (2025).
