Green Hosting (Sustainable Web Hosting)
Green hosting is web hosting whose servers are demonstrably run on renewable energy, or whose emissions the provider covers through offset payments. Organisations such as the Green Web Foundation verify providers against publicly available evidence and list them in an open dataset that also feeds tools like the Green Web Check.
In practice
In practice, website owners choosing a host should look beyond price and performance and check whether the provider is listed in the Green Web Foundation's open dataset or discloses its own renewable electricity certification – marketing claims without evidence are worth treating with caution. Where a provider advertises offset payments, it is worth looking closely at which emissions are actually avoided and which are merely compensated for. It is also important that green hosting does not replace technical performance work: in our assessment – we are not aware of robust studies on this – a slow but "green" server often causes more energy use in the end, through longer load times, more data transfer and higher device load, than a fast, well-optimised server on a conventional electricity mix.