According to a 2014 report from Berkeley Lab, “1.8 percent of the total U.S. electricity consumption went to data centers.” That’s a total of 70 billion kilowatt hours—wow! Since then, the internet has taken great strides in order to lessen the consumption of energy, including becoming more efficient by better managing electricity draw and cooling processes. Although these data centers are the primary focus for the web’s energy use, we can still do our part to help make the internet a greener, more sustainable place as well.
Here are a couple of tips to help the world wide web become a more sustainable place.
Page Speed
Search speed not only helps boost your Google ranking, it also plays a role in the web’s energy consumption. Faster load times result in less processing power which, in turn, means less energy consumption from your MacBook to the hyper-scale computing facility. You can use the optimization options in Google’s Web Developer Toolkit to pinpoint and minimize load time by optimizing your cache, optimizing your images and minimizing your website’s code.
It’s smart to approach a web design using the mobile-first methodology. This way, you can avoid utilizing necessary processing power to load large assets for a small screen. Not only will you be optimizing the www energy usage, you’ll also save a small percent of your user’s battery life, something everyone can appreciate.
Green Hosting
Yes, green hosting is real, and it’s spectacular! Carbon-free hosting does exist and through AISO.net, it’s not only solar-powered but also a super-efficient, super-responsive hosting company. AISO boasts an annual reduction of 34,488 lbs of Carbon Dioxide, 50.6 lbs of Nitrogen Oxide and 37.4 lbs of Sulfate (that’s smog and acid rain, folks)—equalling out to 8 acres of trees per year. We couldn’t help but jump on this a couple of years ago and hope they serve as a solid example for the creation of more sustainable hosting services. Not only that—their customer service is excellent, as well! Thanks for your help, Phil.
Building for a Greener Internet also helps your Pocket Book
When we develop a more sustainable website, we do so with full business sustainability in mind. Not only are we using the latest HTML standards (hypertext markup language—code standards we use to develop websites) built around the principle of saving you money, you’ll also reap the benefits of better search engine optimization, or SEO—the process of maximizing visitors to your website by ensuring that it appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine. We can also host you on our TIS/AISO-dedicated server so you can benefit from carbon-free hosting, as well!
Interested in learning more, or converting your web hosting service? Shoot us an email and we’ll get ya started.
