34. Choose a sustainable hosting provider
Why does it matter?
Data centers represent 15% of all digital emissions, from the building construction to the hardware manufacturing, transportation, usage, and end of life. With the current surge in AI usage, Goldman Sachs Research estimates that data center power demand will grow 160% by 2030. They mainly consume water for cooling purposes and electricity for powering servers and cooling systems. Google alone reported a consumption of 5.6 billion gallons of water between 2018 and 2022. Selecting a green hosting solution is essential for environmental sustainability in digital product development. It minimizes carbon emissions, supports renewable energy, and reduces the product’s ecological impact.
What can I do?
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Prioritize data centers that directly use clean energy on-premises or through their electric utility over those purchasing renewable energy contracts to become sustainable.
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Make sure your infrastructure uses clean energy as primary or exclusive sources. Either because it is located in clean energy-rich regions and grids (wind, solar, hydro), or because it has clean sources on-site without needing to access the grid.
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Check the carbon intensity of Data Centers by providers and by regions (graphic at the bottom)
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Use Green Web Check to determine if your product runs on green energy. Please note that this tool cannot tell you if data centers are powered by renewable energy or if they have purchased renewable energy contracts.
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Size your real infrastructure needs. Oversizing can increase the manufacturing of new servers and means you are overpaying and increasing your carbon footprint. Undersizing can reduce server’s lifetime by putting them under too much load (such as overheating or overuse).
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Assess the energy efficiency of your servers and data centers: Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE), and Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE)
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Assess how providers manage their electronic and electrical equipment waste
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Ask about their responsible procurement strategy
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Ask about their projects and roadmap to improve their performance and mitigate their impact
What does success look like?
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🧑💰 Efficient utilization of data centers and servers for greener operations
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🌍 Active steps to minimize Electrical and Electronic Equipment Waste
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💰 Optimization leading to reduced cloud expenditure
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🌍 Energy efficiency measures leading to decreased consumption
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🌍💰 Adoption of cleaner electricity sources for operations
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🌍💰 Reduced water usage in operations
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🌍 Established targets for reduced carbon and greenhouse gas emissions
Things to consider
Switching to a clean hosting solution is among the first actions you can take to reduce your digital footprint. If you work for a startup or small organization, it should not be too difficult to sell this idea, given its environmental impact and potential for cost reduction. However, if you work for a larger group or organization, you may need to convince a large amount of stakeholders including C-level executives, as such decisions may be made beyond the product team. If your service is running on-premises and you want to optimize your virtual machines and servers, EasyVirt and fruggr.io can provide such services. Scaphandre is also a great open-source solution to measure your power consumption. If you plan to run your software on Kubernetes, either on-premise or in the cloud, take a look at the CNCF TAG Environmental Sustainability.