Welcome to my new(ish), greener website – feel the wind (power) in your hair

Exciting update today: welcome to my new website! “But wait,” you might be thinking. “Your website looks exactly the same as the last time I visited.” And, yes, you’d be right. But, there’s been an important tweak behind the scenes: I've signed up to a green hosting provider. My website hosting is now powered by 100% renewable energy from UK wind farms. What's more, its energy-efficient datacentre is based in London.

If you, like me, are concerned with minimising your environmental impact, you might also have found it overwhelming to think about everything you need to do to make your business as green as possible. I’ve found the best approach is taking one step at a time and this is my latest step. While making some changes to my website, I realised my hosting provider didn't align with my values. When I’d originally set up my website, my web dev had organised the hosting for me. Until know, I’d just continued renewing my contract with the same provider.

Doing a bit of digging, I found my previous hosting provider had no environmental policies. Plus, their server was based all the way out in the USA. Not to mention that, when I got in touch, their customer services team had no idea about their green policies. Some even confirmed they definitely used renewable energy when that’s not the case! So, I was delighted to find a much better fit for me: Green Hosting.

Why is green hosting important?

Did you know that powering datacentres and cloud computing is, reportedly, the second largest global contributor to carbon emissions after the aviation industry? We don’t often talk about the impact of our internet usage on the environment but it’s a pretty staggering, albeit unseen, problem. Put simply, keeping the internet running takes huge amounts of energy. And where does that energy come from? Largely, fossil fuels.

What are the details of your new green hosting provider?

So, I made the switch. If you’re wondering what that means, my hosting provider is now Green Hosting: one of the first and still one of the few truly green web hosting providers in the UK.

Jez and the team at Green Hosting walked me through everything. It was pretty straightforward. I chose my package, paid the fee and gave them the access they needed to back up and move my site. After a minor delay (I would explain what it was but, honestly, I don’t really know what a nameserver is!), it was all sorted. Hello greener website!

Now, my website is powered by 100% by renewable energy, all year round, right here in the UK. It datacentre (Centro) – which houses the hosting servers, routers and cooling systems – is based in London and runs entirely on renewable energy generated from UK wind farms. The datacentre has also been designed and built to be as energy efficient as possible (by extracting hot air from the building and using naturally cold air from outside in the water-based chillers so cooling systems don’t need to be constantly at full power, in case you were wondering). Supplied via the grid, the power doesn’t cut out when there's no wind. This means it doesn’t need to fall back on fossil fuels. Reliable, green, local: sounds good to me!

Thank you, Green Hosting!

A big thank you to Jez and the team at Green Hosting / Make Hay for being so quick, friendly and helpful – and bearing with me when I asked, probably several, silly questions! I’m delighted to have found a company committed to keeping their service green and always working to be greener.