Links

Web hosting

Summary of issue

Hosting a website or a web service has an environmental impact. On this page, we provide a link to a service that estimates the cost of a website and a list of services that offer green web hosting or servers.

Questions Raised

In this page, we try to address the following issues:
  1. 1.
    "What is the carbon footprint for web hosting and web services?"
  2. 2.
    "Are there more sustainable hosting services that can be recommended?"

Information and recommendations (TL;DR)

Notes

Below a list of services that offer green hosting alternatives.
Name
Link
How is it green
cost web hosting
Server
kualo
100% Green Powered
3 (10gb)- 10 (50gb)/month
24 month
netcetera
3 (5gb) 6.60 (20 gb) per month https://www.netcetera.co.uk/hosting/
55 (8 tb 512gb ram) 110 (10 tb 128 gb ram)
erjjio
100% renewable energy, optimise it to reduce its carbon emissions, and plant trees on your behalf every month, partenship with https://edenprojects.org/
5(10 GB)/month'7 (Unlimited disk storage)
aiso
solar panel system, according to their count is the equivalent of planting 8 acres of trees per year. Every hosting account with AISO is green and powered by on-site solar.
$6.25 (10 GB )
10 (30gb 1gb ram), 45 (50 gb 4 gb ram) (many packages, two are examples)
raidboxes
https://raidboxes.io/it/wordpress-green-hosting/ reforestation of Eden Reforestation Projects, support the Get Mads initiative, rely on sustainable, certified green electricity from hydropower, (only wordpress)
15 per month (1wordpress website 5gb ssd)
-
greennet
Our primary servers are located in a London datacentre which buys its electricity from Scottish Power Renewables, generated from British on-shore and off-shore wind as well as some tidal and wave power sources.
£108.00 inc. VAT per year (1bg)
greenhost
100% Renewable energy from local windmills Wooden, sustainable office building Participating in multiple sustainability projects https://greenhost.net/blog/2018/02/22/making-greenhost-even-greener/
€ 51.00 / year (1000 MB), € 108.00 / year 5 GB https://greenhost.net/products/hosting/
€ 5.75 / month (5 GB) https://greenhost.net/products/vps/
acornhost
Our web hosting is powered by 100% green energy from wind and solar sources. As a company, we also embrace sustainable practices like recycling and tele-commuting.
$8.95 5GB space 100 GB bandwidth
s-4.host
100% Renewable energy,Heat recovery and reuse for 25,000 homes, we will plant a tree in your name, stay with us for a year and we will plant three more, Ethical partnerships https://s-4.host/sustainability/
50,000 visits €10 per month

NIME web hosting information

Present situation

NIME.org is a fully static site built on Jekyll and forum.nime.org is a Discourse instance which requires a VPS (video discussing setup as of July 2020). At present we use the following hosting services:
  • Proceedings: static data hosting (presently in an Amazon S3 bucket in US East N. Virginia region)
  • nime.org: continuous integration from jekyll source on GitHub + static web hosting (presently hosted on Netlify free tier)
  • forum.nime.org: virtual private server (presently hosted on DigitalOcean 1vCPU/1GB VPS in FRA1 region).
NIME does not use any traditional shared hosting services.

Present sustainability notes

  • Digital Ocean, does not have a sustainability statement, but users have been tracking energy sources for individual data centres. The FRA1 data centre appears to use 100% renewable energy (source)
  • Amazon AWS, has a goal of 100% renewable energy by 2025 (source), not clear what the energy mix is for particular data centers. May be desirable to reduce use of AWS, both from a cost and sustainability perspective.
  • Netlify has a sustainability statement, which focuses on efficient computation of web services, not on achieving 100% renewable energy, they note that their distributed infrastructure makes it hard to measure renewable energy usage. Could replace, but any use of cached/CDN backed static website could likely have the same issues and this is desirable for serving our main page to a global audience.
The proceedings (and supplementary files) requires around 20GB of disk space and bandwidth requirements are 80-120GB per month.

Contributor(s)