So you’re a sustainable business, but how green is your website hosting?

So you’re a sustainable business, but how green is your website hosting?

Sustainability is an increasingly important consideration in all areas of business, yet many organisations may not have ever considered the environmental impact of their website…

The exciting, ever-changing and evolving nature of web design means globally its energy demands are increasing. With the internet being a virtual space it’s hard to understand how it could ever have a significant impact on the environment, yet it can.

The communications industry as a whole could soon be using 20% of the world’s energy by 2025, and research has shown that if the internet were a country it would be the sixth-largest polluting in the world.1  While this seems like a terrifying statistic, things are not as bad as they appear and the good news is there are great strides being taken to reduce this through various innovative technologies, one of which is green hosting.

 

The popularity of green web hosting is growing, rapidly…

The growing awareness and popularity of green web hosting means that there is an increasing number of providers to choose from, with most big names offering green solutions or making their own commitments to move to sustainable sources of energy.

There are different ways that hosting providers can be deemed as ‘green’ and these include things like exclusively or partially using renewable energy to power their servers, ensuring they are being super efficient in their use of energy or actively offsetting their carbon footprint in various ways.

Here at Above Digital we are making conscious moves toward reducing our own carbon footprint, and have some exciting ideas which we will be implementing in the near future to help us become as sustainable as possible.

There are a lot of options out there to address the impact your business has on the environment from carbon offsetting through companies like Carbon Neutral Britain and Carbon Footprint, to buying areas of woodland via companies like the Woodland Trust. Obviously, as a digital agency, we don’t only have our own site to think about but also the dozens of client websites that we host and look after year on year, so with that in mind it seemed responsible for us to find the highest level web hosting solutions that minimise our environmental impact whilst still offering a great service to our business clients.

 

There is no need to compromise on quality when it comes to green hosting…

We have a variety of green hosting options to offer our clients depending on their individual requirements and are always on hand to offer advice to ensure they get great hosting that performs at the highest level whilst being eco friendly. Examples of this include the internationally recognised ISO14001 standard hosting which iOS awarded to organizations helping to improve their environmental performance through more efficient use of resources and reduction of waste.

The good news is that going for green hosting doesn’t have to sacrifice the level of service you can expect from your hosting provider. We have taken time to source green hosting solutions for our clients that don’t compromise when it comes to reliability, speed or security.

Our green hosting packages include things like; backups every 3 days, Cloudflare Integration and DDOS protection, immediate updates for any important WordPress Core Security improvements, complete protection from hackers, and consistent website performance reports along with a host of other features, meaning sites are fast, reliable and extremely secure.

If you would like to find out more about green hosting, what solutions would be best for your website and what practical steps you can take to reduce your website’s impact on the environment then get in touch.

 

References:
1. ‘Tsunami of data’ could consume one fifth of global electricity by 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/11/tsunami-of-data-could-consume-fifth-global-electricity-by-2025