The Rise of Green Hosting
If you ask people to name the most harmful industries to the environment, they might mention five key ones. These might include petrochemicals, aviation, automotive, plastics, and fossil fuel energy production. Intensive agriculture may also make the list. All visible producers of carbon, pollution and waste.
Not things necessarily associated in the public imagination with web hosting, it’s fair to say. But the computer servers and data centres that form the bedrock of the internet need electricity to work. One estimate says that data centres now use about 3% of all electricity on Earth. And with 80% of electricity still generated by burning fossil fuels, that makes the internet one of the biggest single contributors to carbon emissions.
In the past, businesses focused on cost, speed, and reliability when selecting a service to host their websites. More people are thinking about their environmental impact. They are looking for sustainable web hosting options that can help reduce their carbon footprint. And that has driven the rise and rise of green web hosting.
So, what makes ‘green’ web hosting different? Why are carbon emissions from ‘traditional’ web hosting so high, and what does green hosting do to put that right? And how can you find a good web host for your own business?
What is the Environmental Impact of Traditional Web Hosting?
The issue with web hosting is scale. There are no exact figures for how many web servers there are in the world. But we do know there are more than one billion websites operational.
While there is no direct link between websites and hosting servers, the largest sites use many servers. They do this to keep fast speeds and handle high traffic from around the world. Although to balance this, lots of smaller websites may share a single server. A billion web servers aren’t an unrealistic ballpark figure.
Web servers don’t need electricity just to power them. They also need cooling systems to stop them overheating as they work.
The trend in recent years has been to make data centres bigger and bigger, with more and more servers stacked together. That makes sense from a scalability perspective for data centre operators.
But packing more servers together generates more heat. Which means it takes more to keep them cool. Which means more electricity.
A decade ago, when less efficient HDD servers were still the norm (HDD servers transfer data by mechanically spinning a disc, which requires constant power input), 86% of traditional data centre energy consumption was split evenly between powering servers and powering cooling systems.
Since then, as global internet traffic has increased by a couple of orders of magnitude, demand for data centre capacity has grown exponentially, too. And while some of that growth has been mitigated by ‘greener’ data centre technologies (SSD drives, cloud hosting etc), we’ve also seen a huge increase in hyperscale data centres – server banks on a truly industrial scale, and all the challenges around cooling that carries with it.
What Does Green Web Hosting Mean?
The core aim of green web hosting is simple – to reduce the carbon footprint of hosting services and make the internet more sustainable. There are three main routes to achieving this.
Renewable energy
The most obvious way to cut the carbon footprint of web hosting is to switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. But because most of the electricity available through the main grid still comes from fossil fuels, this can be trickier than it seems.
One option is for hosting companies to build their own renewable energy sources. The easiest and cheapest options are to install solar panels and wind turbines.
But data centres need a reliable and consistent source of electricity 24/7. Solar and wind energy are dependent on the weather. It’s difficult to run a data centre entirely on either.
Other sources of renewable energy such as hydroelectric, geothermal and biomass are more costly and, in the case of hydroelectric power, location-dependent. There are isolated examples of hosting companies investing in these kinds of energy production facilities for their own consumption. But a much more common practice is the use of renewable energy certificates (RECs) to offset electricity used from non-renewable sources.
RECs involve ‘buying’ units of electricity from renewable sources to feed into the public grid. They are popular with web hosting companies (including giants like Amazon) because they avoid the logistical challenges of guaranteeing a stable and constant supply of green electricity for their own data centres. Instead, energy sourcing is closely monitored, and for every megawatt of electricity that comes from burning fossil fuels, the host pays for an equal amount that comes from renewable sources. The amount of green electricity available for consumption therefore increases.
While RECs help the web hosting industry make a positive contribution to renewable energy production overall, critics point out that they don’t directly contribute to reducing the industry’s fossil fuel consumption. Schemes that focus more directly on increasing local renewable capacity are more favourable than generic offset schemes.
Energy efficiency
Another way to reduce the carbon footprint of data centres is to cut the amount of energy they need to operate. There are lots of ways to boost the energy efficiency of web servers. As mentioned, technological innovations like SSD storage drives and cloud computing have made big strides. But there is plenty more that can be done.
By virtualising and consolidating server resources, cloud hosting can be anywhere up to 40% more energy efficient than traditional ‘bare metal’ hosting. Reliance on physical server space leads to underutilisation, with servers running at a fraction of their capacity but still requiring 100% power input, 24/7.
Data centres are also plagued with ‘zombie’ servers, or those that are powered on but aren’t actually providing any compute function, lost and forgotten about in the vast server racks. Managing the capacity of all servers via virtualisation provides clear oversight of resource capacity, allowing data centres to meet demand with fewer servers switched on, and thus saving energy.
Cooling systems
With cooling systems accounting for upwards of 40% of a data centre’s energy consumption, a lot of attention has understandably turned to reducing the need for electricity-guzzling A/C and fans. This quest has inspired some pretty far-out solutions, such as Microsoft’s experiments with locating data centres underwater.
But you don’t have to Google ‘underwater data centre’ to find a web hosting service that makes use of energy efficient cooling. Modern data centres are able to get impressive results from simple adjustments to design and layout. One example is ‘hot aisle/cold aisle containment’, which creates alternating hot and cold areas in a data centre so convection currents move air around and regulate temperatures naturally, without the need for electrical pumps.
Air and ground source heat pumps, which are growing in popularity as renewable sources of domestic heating, and can also be used to provide an eco-friendly cooling option in data centres.
How to Find Green Web Hosting
Picking the right web host for your business’s website can’t overlook the fundamentals of speed, storage capacity, bandwidth, security and location. Your first priority has to be having an attractive, engaging website that gives users a smooth, convenient experience. Matching hosting resources to your needs is a key part of that.
But these days you can have all of that and a host that prioritises energy efficient, carbon neutral operations. Green web hosting is not the niche category dominated by small providers it was a few years ago. Use resources like the Green Web Foundation directory to look up sustainable hosting services that match your needs.
For our part, Key Element provides a bespoke UK web hosting package using our own hosting infrastructure, which runs entirely on renewable energy., and we work closely with Ecologi to offset carbon emissions by funding a range of environmental projects around the world. These include reforestation and natural habitat restoration as well as backing for solar and other renewable energy projects.
Please feel free to get in touch with us to discuss our work and find out how we can help you reduce your carbon footprint with a more sustainable approach to web hosting.
Robert Cowell
