If you drove to the moon and back 62 times, you’d be producing the same amount of carbon as YouTube produces every single day.
Giles Cambray
About green web hosting
Its carbon footprint and the truth behind 100% renewable energy.
Giles Cambray
- 7 min
I was recently asked whether we used carbon neutral hosting providers. I thought it an excellent question. It had been a while since I’d looked up environmental credentials of various cloud platforms, so I went to find out. A couple of hours later, I finally emerged from a Googling rabbit hole and felt relatively enlightened. I thought I’d share what I learnt.
TLDR; AWS is shit. Google Cloud is less so.
I suppose I had some romantic notion that it was mostly about hosting companies in Iceland, all powered by geothermal energy and who cooled down servers by opening the window. And it appears there are some excellent innovations out there designed to keep the electricity consumption down, like hosting at the bottom of the sea, or using heat from data centres to heat swimming pools. And in some cases, energy is created by renewables – sometimes actually onsite. But not all is as it seems; statements from any company claiming to run on 100% renewable energy can be an exercise in accounting as much as anything else, and tech firms are definitely part of this trend.
In the end, the bigger cloud platforms are going to be more energy efficient than a server rack in your backroom cupboard and less energy used does equate to less carbon in the atmosphere. But as conclusions go, “host in the cloud cos it’s just better”, is a bit bollocks, isn’t it? My hope is though that these ramblings show that it can make a difference which cloud host you choose. Understanding who’s best, however, is actually not an easy process – the creds don’t always backup the claims. Seemingly, Google’s stack up pretty well at the moment. But in 5 years’ time? Let’s see what happens.
Either way, it’s a fascinating subject and something that will remain – and absolutely needs to remain – on our agendas. We all have a responsibility to make informed decisions about the carbon footprint of the Digital Transformation projects we undertake.
And so, I am very grateful to my client for asking the question in the first place! Thanks @Faymilton… guess we’ll host your site in Google Cloud, huh?!
If you’d like to challenge us with the questions, then we’re keen to bring the answers. Get in touch to book in a chat!