How can I reduce my website's environmental impact ?
Internet servers are consuming more than 400 TWh each year, corresponding to about 1.6% of all electricity produced worldwide, or 32000 times the equivalent power produced by a nuclear plant. The yearly electricity consumption of cryptocurrencies alone are already 40 TWh. The embodied energy to build computers, networks, hardware, running and using them, amounts up to 6.2% of the world's annual production. Even though an email saves on paper and transport, every internet user is partly responsible for its heat production and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, carbon dioxide and water vapor.
With a carbon footprint of 4.96 billions of internet users in April 2020, YES WE CAN reduce the internet's impact on our environment.
Sure, wireless communication will always produce radiation, and transferring network data will always consume energy. But shorter physical distance between data storage and your computer will reduce power consumption. Further on, you can contribute a lot by keeping your website efficient, compact and... don't forget to resize your graphics to save data transfer speed meaning energy. Around 300 MtCO2e is generated due to online video, and a lot of people are responsible for useless GHG emissions by only listening to youtube videos without even watching the content. Turn off that video portion!! During 90% of the time, data centres are wasting energy while their servers are on standby, still pulling power for cooling harddisks that are not even full, because the client has paid for exclusivity or unlimited capacity. To reduce this waste of energy, standby-time and disk space, we should consolidate a maximum of websites on the same server. Virtualisation can save 10-40% of energy costs. Go for multi-hosting of websites and use sub-domains! Further cooling energy waste can be reduced by installing data centres in cold climates. Facebook's Swedish data centre is doing so, but still needs 500 huge fans for cooling its servers. That's still better than the 34 relatively large coal-fired power plants Mr.Trump wanted to use to generate 90 TWh to run the US data-centres, when he quit the climate deal. Lucky enough, he's gone ant the US are back in. However... what does it mean, being aware of the gravity of the situation, having all these nice objectives, and having our efforts annihilated by bombs and explosions of a useless war, and getting back dirty coal plants and poisonous shale gas exploration in 2022?? But still... YES WE CAN!!
Intelligent hosting of websites and data storage running on energy-friendly servers can reduce the energy footprint of internet users.
Power your website from servers that run on power purchased with RECS-certificates. RECS stands for Renewable Energy Certificate System, and is a worldwide collaboration that makes it possible to book and claim green power. In 2021, for the 4th year since 2017, Google claimed to be 100% carbon neutral matching its total electricity use with renewable energy purchases, running their data centres entirely on 6 Gigawatts of renewable energy which is now delivering 7x more computing power as before. But nevertheless, Google sometimes operates with power from sources that emit carbon dioxide. CNBC published that Google really used 15.5 TWh of electricity in 2020. One single search operation still consumes the equivalent of turning a 60 watts lightbulb on for 6.25 seconds, which is very much compared to the claim that your life on Google uses less energy in a month than leaving this lightbulb on for 1 hour.. |
There are no passengers on spaceship Earth. We are all crew.
(Herbert Marshall McLuhan)
Global temperature change |
Get your web site running on green energy ! You can choose to have your website hosted by a provider whose servers are solely running on 100% renewable wind energy or solar power, having data centres in several countries keeping data transfer distances short and wasting less cooling energy and storage space. We can recommend One, award-winning Denmark-based company running on 100% wind power in a cold climate, hosting most of our websites. Subscribe to One through our referral program, and you will help us getting a referral bonus, which we will reinvest in projects to reduce impact on our environment. Thank you!
Want to show the world that you are concerned by our planet Earth ? Then you should get a .Earth domain name for your website ! We can recommend NameSilo for your domain registration, as they are the cheapest, secure, honest, hassle-free, with no hidden fees. Register your domain name with NameSilo through our referral program for immediate discount prices and to help us reduce impact on our environment.
You can't afford to get a .Earth domain name, but
you've got a speleological project for a better Earth? Send us an e-mail and apply for your personalized Speleo .EARTH, .TV or .Nu subdomain pointing to your website or for a lifetime you@speleo.EARTH, @Speleo.TV or @Speleo.nu email alias. We will send you a paypal link to send us a small one-time setup donation (you decide!) to show the world that you are supporting Speleo.EARTH, Speleo.TV and Speleo.nu for a better planet Earth!
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