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.
In this page, we try to address the following issues:
- "What is the carbon footprint for web hosting and web services?"
- "Are there more sustainable hosting services that can be recommended?"
- You can check the impact of your website: https://www.websitecarbon.com/
- Consider using one of the green hosting services listed below.
- Read information about NIME's current web hosting situation.
Below a list of services that offer green hosting alternatives.
| Name | Link | How is it green | cost web hosting | Server |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| kualo | https://www.kualo.co.uk | 100% Green Powered | 3 (10gb)- 10 (50gb)/month | 24 month |
| netcetera | https://www.netcetera.co.uk/ | Zero Carbon Datacentre https://www.netcetera.co.uk/datacentre/#green | 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 | https://erjjiostudios.com/green-web-hosting/ | 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 | https://www.aiso.net/ | 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/ | 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 | https://www.greennet.org.uk/ | 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 | https://greenhost.net/ | 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 | https://www.acornhost.com/ | 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 | https://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.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.
- 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.
- Raul Masu
- Charles Martin NIME webmaster