Carbon Footprint of your Website

It’s true; websites and business applications can play a major part in cutting an organisation’s carbon footprint. Automating processes, improving communication, reducing print and travel are all ways that an online system can contribute to reduced carbon emissions. But have you considered the carbon footprint of your web applications themselves?

We recycle our waste, encourage lift sharing, and even our teabags go into a wormery - but we don’t claim to be eco warriors. We do our best to make sure the design and build process is as green as possible, but what about running, hosting and maintaining your web application?

For a website or web application to be accessed by its users, it needs to be hosted on a web server. Where downtime can be costly, websites and mission critical applications need to be available 100% of the time, this alone has a significant impact on the environment. For example, a moderate size server has about the same annual carbon footprint as a diesel guzzling 4x4 running 15 miles to the gallon.

Then comes the data centre itself. A good data centre will provide you with a secure place to house your server, an air conditioned environment with uninterrupted power, connectivity and early fire suppression. Imagine a room, with dozens of rows of server racks, each housing up to 42 servers – that’s hundreds of diesel guzzling 4x4’s in one room. The suspended floor is vibrating, with plumes of conditioned air coming through the vents. A canister poised to deploy hundreds of litres of CO2 to extinguish a fire should it be detected. And large diesel generators ready to kick in should the multi megawatt power feed be interrupted. This makes a data centre probably one of the most unenvironmentally friendly buildings on the planet.

So what can be done? It’s important to consider the environmental impacts of your applications when choosing a hosting solution, as you will do with security, redundancy, connectivity and uptime. We host web applications for many of our clients, and have developed an approach to hosting that offers maximum reliability and minimum impact to the environment.

Starting with web servers themselves. Traditionally individual servers would be used, either dedicated boxes or shared. These are inefficient, under-utilised, difficult to scale and costly. By combining multiple servers and SAN storage we can now virtualise servers on a pool of processing power and storage. Not only does virtualisation offer additional redundancy, and instant scalability the infrastructure can be utilised at optimum capacity, reducing wastage, cost and CO2.

As for the physical data centre, steps can be made to optimise the efficiency and reduce emissions. We carefully selected a hosting provider that has a solid environmental policy, and who is making steps to reduce their carbon emissions. Here are just some of the steps being taken to reduce emissions in our data centre facility.

Use of energy from providers who utilise renewable energy sources.
Use of the latest energy efficient servers, which use up to 50% less power.
Use of cold aisle containment and blanking plates to contain cold air in cold aisles.
Use of highly efficient UPS systems which achieve approximately 95% efficiency.
Continual research and design improvement to data centre layout and equipment.

Whilst this ensures our hosting solution is as efficient and reliable as possible, there’s still room for improvement. Technology is continually evolving, but in the mean time we need to bridge the closing gap. So to ensure our hosting is carbon neutral, all emissions associated with our hosting platform are offset with Climate Care. Climate Care fund projects in green energy, energy efficiency and forest restoration around the world to reduce emissions on our behalf. The result; mission critical, low impact, carbon neutral hosting.

So when planning your next web project, remember to consider the environment when choosing your hosting solution. There’s room to improve business efficiencies, and environmental impact too!