Where Your Website Lives
Your website runs on a physical computer, in a building somewhere, drawing power every hour of every day whether anybody visits or not. Most people who own a website have never had cause to think about that. It is invisible by design.
It deserves a few minutes, and not for reasons about feeling virtuous.
The internet accounts for roughly 3.7% of global greenhouse gas emissions, which puts it in comparable territory to the airline industry. That number surprises people, because a website feels weightless in a way a plane does not.
Your own site is a rounding error inside that, obviously. But it is a rounding error you are choosing the supplier for, and the choice costs nothing, which is a rare combination.
There is a number for how efficiently a data centre runs, called PUE, or power usage effectiveness. It compares the total power going into the building against the power actually reaching the computers.
A PUE of 1.0 would mean every watt reached a server and nothing went on cooling, lighting or losses. That is not achievable. The industry tends to sit at 1.2 or above. The centres we host on run at 1.12, meaning about twelve pence in every pound of power goes on everything that is not the actual computing.
That gap sounds small and is not, once you multiply it by every machine in a building running continuously for a decade.
It is also a question you can ask any host. Most cannot answer it, and that tells you something on its own.
The phrase gets used loosely, and it covers two different claims.
Renewable energy means the power is generated from renewable sources. Ours is on 100% renewable energy through the data centre operators' arrangements with their suppliers.
Carbon offsetting is different. It means the power came from wherever it came from, and someone bought credits afterwards. Offsetting is not nothing, but it is not the same claim, and hosts are not always careful about which one they are making.
If a host says "carbon neutral", it is fair to ask which of those two it is.
Here is the practical argument, and if the green part leaves you cold this is the one that matters.
Efficient data centres are usually well-run data centres. PUE is a proxy for whether somebody is paying attention: modern kit, sensible cooling, proper capacity planning. The same operators tend to be the ones with decent redundancy, sane network design and staff who answer the phone.
Cheap hosting is often cheap because the building is old, the machines are overloaded and no one has invested in years. The Real Cost of “Free” is the same argument about software. You feel that as slow page loads and unexplained outages long before you feel it as carbon.
So "where does your site live and how efficiently does that building run" is a question about reliability that happens to also be a question about emissions.
Ask your host Where are the data centres, physically. Is the power renewable, or offset. What is the PUE.
If you cannot get answers, that is your answer. None of it is commercially sensitive, and any host who cares about it will tell you happily.
Ours are in the UK and the US, on 100% renewable energy, at a PUE of 1.12. We do not make a great deal of noise about it, but it was a deliberate choice and it is a fair thing to ask us to prove.
If you have no idea where your site currently lives, we can usually tell you in a couple of minutes. Get in touch if you would like us to look.
Choose the emails that suit you:
Choose one or both. You’ll receive no more than three emails in a month, and can change your choice or unsubscribe at any time.