How green is your website?

The importance of green hosting

When it comes to choosing a web hosting solution, we typically assess a variety of aspects such as cost, reputation, ease of use or perhaps we settle for whatever our website company recommends. However, an important criteria often overlooked is the environmental impact of hosting your website or software. It's an easy area to overlook! But why exactly does it matter and why should you make 2023 your year to switch?

A crucial aspect to keep in mind is that unless you are self-hosting, a larger quantity of servers and data centres are required to power and deliver your website to customers. Often, these data centres are run on fossil fuels and consume an incredible amount of energy to run.

"My website is small, it doesn't make that much of a difference right?"

To understand the scope of the issue, let's dig deeper into the collective impact of running a website, whether it be a single-page microsite or a large-scale enterprise intranet. You may know that the aviation industry has been highly criticised for its environmental impact - as it accounts for 2.7% of all global emissions (as of 2020). However, it's little known that the internet and its supporting infrastructure produce an estimated 3.7% of the world's CO2! (source)

To put that figure into perspective, the internet produces more carbon annually than Singapore, Hong Kong, Mongolia and The Philippines combined. This figure should highlight the overall impact of the issue and the importance behind needing to commit ourselves to reducing our footprint.

The solution

An unrealistic solution to the issue would be to ask people to reduce their internet usage. And why should we? The internet is a great thing and unlocks a world of opportunities for people and businesses. An actionable and immediate solution to implement would be to switch to a green hosting provider.

Because of our global shift towards adopting a greener mindset, there are a plethora of out-of-the-box solutions dedicated to ensuring your website is hosted sustainably and efficiently. One of our trusted suppliers, Cloudflare, is not only one of the leading and fastest hosting platforms in the world but also runs on 100% renewable energy and does so at an incredibly affordable price. The switch is quick, easy and inexpensive so get in touch today to find out how we can turn your website sustainable.

To help further combat the internet's impact on the environment and maximise your new ecological efforts, why not support the reduction of carbon through a tree planting initiative? When you partner with VISCREO for your hosting needs, we dedicate ourselves to planting 5 new trees Every. Single. Month! This gives our customers peace of mind knowing that an entire aspect of their business is carbon negative without any need for hard work on their end.

Reasons to go green

🌱 Reduced environmental impact

The major benefit of using a green hosting provider is the overall reduced impact on the environment. This is achieved through reduced energy consumption, only running on renewable energies and making commitments to offset even the minimal quantities of CO2 produced.

📈 Boosts business reputation / promotional effects

By going green, you can demonstrate to customers and your industry that you are committed to fighting climate change. It's a small but powerful tool to help build trust, loyalty and oftentimes outperform your competitors. Which in turn, can act as a promotional marketing effect for your business.

💰 Cost-saving opportunities

On top of saving the planet, green hosting helps you save your wallet too. Their data centres run on 100% renewable energy, which oftentimes works out cheaper to run. These cost savings get passed down to customers in the form of cheaper (if not free) hosting options.

How can I assess my website?

You don’t need to be a technical genius to assess the sustainability impact of running your website. We use a very well-recognised tool called Website Carbon Calculator. This assessment not only allows you to calculate the carbon impact of each website visit but also allows you to calculate the total carbon impact over a year-long period.

This end number won’t mean much to some, so the tool converts those figures into real-world examples to help put into perspective the carbon impact. As an example, at the date of posting this article, this viscreo.co.uk website emits the carbon equivalent of boiling 4,365 cups of tea with 10,000 views a month over a year-long period.

To put that figure into a more digestible number, only 2 trees are required to offset that level of carbon!

How can I reduce my digital impact?

🌳 Switch hosting provider

The first criteria to assess is whether or not your hosting provider is running on renewable energy AND has sustainability commitments in place. Without this step, it will be harder to commit to running a greener website.

🚀 Speed up your website

Reducing code, reducing image sizes and compressing your code are all contributing factors to speeding up your website. The longer a website takes to load, the more processing power is required to deliver it to your readers and thus more emissions are produced.

🤔 Be proactive

Taking measures to make your website passively green is an incredible step! But why stop there? When you partner with VISCREO, we will plant at least 5 trees every single month per website we host!

📨 Get in touch

Reach out to VISCREO and a friendly member of our team will run an independent audit on the sustainability of your website. No commitments whatsoever, we promise to provide a free and independent report with actionable suggestions on areas of improvement.