Selecting A Green Host For Your Website | Good Fronds

Whenever I talk about the subject of greening the internet and reducing website carbon emissions and switching to a green host, people often look at blankly before asking, “Does the internet even produce carbon emissions? how does that work? how does a website emit carbon”. The internet does in fact have a real environmental impact.

Electricity makes the internet happen, meaning that energy consumption and emissions from the internet are pretty massive. Imagine the power being used to keep data centres, telecom networks and the devices that we use to surf the internet all fully operational! It’s estimated that the internet uses more electricity than the whole of the United Kingdom (416.2 terawatt hours of electricity per year to be precise).

2% of global carbon emissions come from the electricity used by the internet.- Selecting A Green Host For Your Website Share on X

2% of global carbon emissions come from the electricity used by the internet and is predicted to continue rising as mass data increases. That’s equivalent to the amount of carbon from the global aviation industry! If the internet was a country, it would be the sixth worst polluter in the world. So what can we do about it?

Measure your website carbon…

You can use a nifty free tool for estimating website CO2 emissions at WebsiteCarbon.com this provides data on the CO2 emissions per page view, the annual CO2 emissions (based on a specified amount of page views), the annual energy consumption and whether or not the website is hosted in a data centre powered by renewable energy. Using this tool it is possible to benchmark your own website against competitors and set targets for your own carbon reduction.

Switch To A Green Host

If you’re in the process of setting up a website or already have a website and want to be more sustainable, one thing to consider is a green web host. One thing you can do to get your sustainable business off to a good start is to choose a green web host like HostPresto who are committed to using renewable energy sources to power their servers, which is where Good Fronds is changing over to as we tested VERY BADLY on the free carbon calculator! – it’s a journey folks.

Your green web host is the basis for everything that happens on your website. If you choose hastily, all those features and graphics you spent time agonising over may not work. Or worse, all people might be able to see when trying to click through to you is a disappointing 404 page. Everyone knows dead links and slow-loading pages are bad for business, but how many of us understand their effects on SEO?

Things to consider…

Your website’s ability to attract visitors depends on ranking well in search engine results. So, you want to make sure that you are choosing a reliable green web host. Whether you’ve invested in franchises or you’re starting from scratch, a reliable host is a must for any successful website.

So what can you do about it? … Wise up to the common errors businesses make every day on the web and get ahead of your competition. Here are four of the most important mistakes to avoid.

“the internet releases around 300m tonnes of CO2 – as much as all the coal, oil and gas burned in Turkey or Poland in one year, or more than half of those burned in the UK”
– Guardian

Understand your provider’s restrictions

Web hosts are businesses like any other. They attract customers with flashy marketing and big promises. But don’t read the fine print, or worse, fail to read up on what you’re signing up for at all, and you can end up suffering the consequences. Different websites need different things from a host, but here’s some important stuff to look out for:

Do they offer enough disk space for you?
Does the bandwidth cover the amount of data and traffic you expect from your site?
Could you add a shop to your website and still expect the same performance?
Are you able to install new software yourself?

When setting up your sustainable business online, it’s impossible to imagine everything you might need in the future. What you can be sure of is that, when your site is successful and you’re driving a thousand+ views per day, introductory 2GB bandwidth packages are not going to cut it.

You can also be sure you’ll want to add new software and you don’t want to go through the hassle of always employing a developer to do it for you. So ask the right questions and know your limits before you buy.

As with every major purchase, it pays to know who you’re buying from. The tricky thing with online reviews is knowing where to look for them and know to know if they’re legitimate. Trustpilot is a fairly safe bet, but also have a look at what tech-leaders are saying about them on authoritative blogs and review sites (e.g. Cnet).

Slooow loading speed…

You want to check whether people are complaining about slow page loading speeds and frequent, unexpected downtime. You might also want to know whether their 3rd party advertising (if you’re using a free green web host) has been problematic for people. If you do a little digging early on, you can save a lot of complicated fixes and changes in the long run.

Choose the right package for your business

It can be a false economy to just jump right in with the cheapest package on offer. As mentioned above, you need to understand how limits to bandwidth, disk space and other features will affect you. You might even be better off with a dedicated server host, instead of the often cheaper shared host alternatives.

Which package and options you choose will depend on your type of business, your expected traffic and what features you want to run on your site. A small, niche blog is unlikely to require an expensive package with a whole gamut of add-ons.

But if you’re an established business setting up a new website and already have a following on, say, social media, it’s fair to say the number of hits to your site will rise pretty quickly from the off and a cheap or free package won’t do.

Similarly, if you’re primarily a shop, with an expansive gallery and a blog, user logins and other database requirements, you’ll need to go all out. There’s no point skimping on your host, especially when you consider that most people abandon their shopping carts if they experience a delay in page loading during checkout.

A wise newbie would check out the recommendations for sites similar to theirs before signing on the dotted line.

Green web hosting choices don’t impact SEO

Your choice of green web host makes a massive difference to your SEO. If your page loading speed is low, you will lose credibility for poor user experience. Slow loading also leads to people abandoning ship, which will register as a high bounce rate, a key metric in your SEO. If your website is experiencing significant downtime (the time when it is not available because of server errors), search engines will, again, lower your ranking for poor user experience.

If your package doesn’t include an SSL certificate to show that it is secure, search engines will rank you lower because they don’t want to drive traffic to spammy or potentially dangerous sites.

Don’t let your other SEO efforts go to waste by not properly considering your green web host provider

Plant Trees to reduce your impact…

Once you’ve switched to a green website host, you can look to offset any other carbon emissions that are linked to your business. A fantastic way to do this is by planting trees. Ecologi offer a great service, you cans et up an account easily, calculate your emissions and begin planting straight away.

Simple steps to reduce website emissions

Choosing a green web host is one of the things you can do to make your website more sustainable. Keeping an eye out for shoddy providers, oversold packages and undercooked data offers can make the difference between your website sinking or soaring. Start reducing your website emissions by using the following simple steps: