Unsurprisingly perhaps, we love websites. They are arguably one of the biggest marketing tools you have and the primary method of giving prospective customers the information they need. As with most things, there are costs involved in having a website, but one cost we don’t normally think about is the cost to our environment.
What do we mean? Well, your website will always be hosted on a server, whether you do that in-house or have a hosting provider and that server uses power. Now multiply that by all the websites in the world.
Of course, not every website has it’s own server (for more about shared server hosting, read our recent blog) and the carbon footprint of an individual website is actually quite small.
It is however estimated that the running costs of the internet as a whole could be as much as 400 terawatt-hours a year. That has been compared to the same global emissions levels as the airline industry.
To put it in terms we can all relate to, consider that a typical household in the UK consumes around 3,100 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. The internet therefore uses the equivalent of 1.29 million UK households.
To help reduce this massive carbon footprint, many web hosting companies are implementing green energy measures. We are proud to say that the data centres we use have partnered with renewable energy suppliers to ensure that 100% of the power consumed comes from renewable sources.
Additionally the data centres have been working hard to ensure that they maximised their efficiency, gaining a ‘power usage efficiency’ (or PUE) rating of 1.12. This rating is calculated as follows:
PUE = Total energy entering the data centre / Energy used by IT equipment inside the data centre
Any rating below 1.2 is considered very efficient and we are delighted that our data centres continue to strive to beat that rating.
If you are looking for website hosting that protects the environment, call us on 01889 280010 or email hello@zephi.co.uk. We would love to hear from you.
