What is Green Web Hosting?

Green web hosting is the practice of choosing a hosting provider that offers green website hosting services for your website and web applications. What does this mean? Well, your hosting provider decides to host your website in data centers or with servers that reduce the carbon emissions generated by the energy needed to run these centers and/or servers.

This can be done in a hand full of ways, two into which we will dive a little deeper:

Data centers and servers: By reducing overall energy consumption and using greener energy sources such as wind, hydro, solar, and geothermal energy.

Web hosting: By optimizing the hosting efficiency so that more websites can be hosted using less energy.

In this blog, we will show you how to choose green web hosting for your sites and applications and how we can help you reduce your websites and, thus, your company's overall carbon footprint.

Will green web hosting help reduce my website’s carbon emissions? And what is my website’s carbon footprint?

With green website hosting, companies can add to their efforts to combat climate change, one of the most urgent problems in our modern world.

Unfortunately, websites have the potential to contribute to our climate crisis. Many people don’t realize this, but websites have a carbon footprint—sometimes extensive. Suppose a website is very complex and consumes a lot of energy. In that case, it may significantly impact the climate—and when you consider the number of sites on the internet as a whole, we’re facing a significant issue. A large part of the energy consumed and the emissions predicted are done by data centers hosting cloud services. Research has projected that by 2025, data centers hosting cloud services will use 20% of global electricity and emit up to 5.5% of global carbon output globally.

Luckily, many companies realize that something needs to be done and are taking steps towards green website hosting. We are one of those companies. 

For our customers, we aim to do the most for their businesses while doing the least harm to the environment. We want to maximize our impact on their teams and businesses while simultaneously ensuring that our environmental footprint is minimal, if present at all. Here’s what we’re doing to be part of the solution with green web hosting services.

Why we believe we offer Green Web Hosting

Four relevant reasons allow us to label ourselves as providing green web hosting services. (We also call these the four pillars of amazee.io’s environmental sustainability.)

We don’t run our own physical data centers or servers.

Did you know that hosting physical data centers and servers is one of the most significant contributors to carbon emissions? McKinsey estimates that up to 40% of the electricity data centers use goes toward keeping servers cool. That's a considerable chunk of energy. This is why green hosting companies prioritize investing in efficient cooling systems. These innovative technologies reduce the energy needed to maintain the optimal temperature for web servers and network equipment, making the entire infrastructure more energy-efficient and contributing towards green hosting capabilities.

We don’t have our own data centers or servers; instead, we rent them from AWS, GCP, and Azure. GCP and Azure are carbon-neutral, and AWS has several carbon-neutral server locations. All three providers are taking significant steps to use only renewable energy (most have this goal set to reach in 2025). (If you want to know which of the three server center providers is deemed the most environmentally friendly, xomnia.com has an interesting read about this.)

Our customers have a choice when working with us, and if they want to stay carbon-neutral and run their website(s) on platforms supplied with energy derived from 100% renewable energy sources, we can make sure all their projects are hosted on GCP. According to their sustainability statement, all Google operations are carbon neutral. They are regionally carbon-free and have set a goal to match their energy consumption with carbon-free energy (CFE) every hour and in every region by 2030. We give customers the choice and freedom to understand precisely what their carbon footprint would be with each provider and to choose accordingly. Their applications will then run in the data center of their choosing. 

The infrastructure we run for ourselves is carbon-free on GCP & AWS.

We run some infrastructure for ourselves, like monitoring and logging, as well as our Lagoon Core. We do our green web hosting on GCP and AWS, both of which use or plan to use 100% renewable energy by 2025 at the latest. Running this infrastructure is necessary for us, so we decided to do so in the most environmentally friendly way possible and work with carbon-neutral providers that could offer or were working on using 100% renewable energy.

We idle and autoscale environments constantly to reduce energy usage.

We don't believe in wasting energy because we believe in green web hosting. We only keep environments active if they contribute to your goals and are being used. Any idling development environment is automatically shut down if it’s not being used. This ensures that 100% of the live development environments are functional, active, and necessary. By reducing something we don’t need, we save energy.

Because we believe in green web hosting, we autoscale all production environments. Production environments are always there and can’t be shut off, like the development environments, but we do scale them down when they’re not needed—for example, at night, when your site probably won’t get as much traffic. Scaling down the number of servers used during these lulls helps conserve energy. So this is something we are doing to reduce carbon emissions and offer green website hosting 24/7/365. 

We are entirely remote globally, using far less energy.

Our organization is entirely remote, so our global energy consumption remains lower. The only resources required for our employees to work are a power socket and a WiFi connection. Driving, commuting, or traveling daily is optional for any of us. This helps us reduce gas usage and emissions daily because our employees can work wherever they want—usually from home! 

Additionally, not having a physical workspace means we don’t need resources like heating, cooling, and powering an entire office daily. Thus, our remote work model contributes to us being able to offer green web hosting services to you!

As a bonus “pillar,” we also consider using Kubernetes as part of our green website hosting services. Here’s how using Kubernetes helps our green hosting efforts:

• We use container-based hosting, which allows us to host and run far more sites and applications than we could using virtual machines. Kubernetes allows us to use our resources in the best, most economical way to reduce cloud waste.
• Containers use far fewer resources than virtual machines. Containerization is also far lighter, energy-efficient, and flexible. Containers allow you and us to run more on the same server than you could in any other way. This saves significant resources and consumes less energy than VMs and other server types.
• Kubernetes allows for denser resource allocation so that we can run more workloads on less infrastructure.

Kubernetes will be essential for the future of sustainable websites and green web hosting.

What can You do as a Developer?

As a developer, you may actively wish to contribute to a greener website and hosting. But how can you do this? By making software development greener! The keyword here is through microservices. These will help you:

• Emphasize code efficiency
• Implement test-driven development
• Adopt green AI methods
• Prevent wasted IT resources

Read the Computer Weekly article on making software development greener to learn more about how to implement this in your daily work life.

The Future of Green Web Hosting is Here

The internet runs on energy, and with that energy comes a carbon footprint. At amazee.io, we believe in taking responsibility for our impact and being part of the solution. That's why we offer green web hosting solutions that prioritize sustainability throughout our entire operation.

Here's how we make a difference:

• We partner with industry leaders like AWS, GCP, and Azure, which are committed to renewable energy sources.
• We are optimizing our infrastructure for minimal energy consumption.
• We are constantly optimizing your environments through autoscaling and server idling.
• We choose a fully remote work model that reduces our overall environmental impact.
• We leverage containerized technology like Kubernetes to maximize resource efficiency.

By choosing amazee.io, you're not just getting a reliable web hosting provider; you're partnering with a company dedicated to building a green hosting future for the web. Join us in making a positive impact—let's power your website green!

Want to chat about how green hosting can improve your site’s carbon footprint? Contact us today to learn more.