How green is my website hosting?
Looking for a green web host can make a big difference to your website carbon emissions.
When we recently helped calculated the new Calculating Digital Emissions figures and saw that it accounts for around 15% of the total. So making sure your webiste is hosted on an eco-friendly provider is an easy win to reduce your website's emissions.
Looking through your website's resources
At EcoPing we don't look at your specific hosting provider. We look through all of your resources and see where they come from and what the energy production is like in those regions
With each daily report we get a list of your websites resources. These resources are everything your website needs to run. It could be HTML, JavaScript or Images.
But, my website is hosted on a green hosting provider, is that good enough?
We don't think so. Many people think becuase my website is hosted with a green website provider that all of their resources will come from that place, and that provider will have renewable energy all the time.
We've found this not to be true. Many website's have images coming from India, JavaScript from Japan and HTML from Hungry and not all of these places produce lots of renewable energy.
Calculating green hosting on EcoPing
If we look at Electricity Map we can get a good idea of the production in different countries. This is what we do on EcoPing.
We match up the resources and try and find where they come from and what the energy production is like in those countries. We add the percentages together to determine how low-carbon and renewable your resouces are. Giving a more realistic reflection of green website hosting.
We believe this gives the best overview of how green your website hosting really is.
We don't look for easily bought certificates or carbon credits.
Best places to host your website
- Iceland - 100% renewable and low-carbon
- Norway - 98%+ renewable and 100% low-carbon
- Sweden - 60% renewable and 90%+ low-carbon
A few different places around the world to look for hosting would be in:
- Quebec, Canada - 100% renewable and low-carbon
- Uruguay - 100% renewable and low-carbon