How green is my server?

The Session does very well in terms of performance. You can see the data from the Chrome UX Report (CRUX).

What’s good for performance is good for the environment. Sure enough, The Session gets a very high score from the website carbon calculator:

Hurrah! This web page achieves a carbon rating of A+

This is cleaner than 99% of all web pages globally

But under the details about hosting it says:

Oh no, it looks like this web page uses bog standard energy

The Session is hosted on DigitalOcean, who tend to be quite tight-lipped about their energy suppliers. Fortunately others have done some sleuthing to figure out which facilities are running on green energy.

One of the locations to get the green thumnbs up is the Amsterdam facility housed by Equinix. That’s where The Session is hosted.

I’m glad that I was able to find out that the site is running on 100% renewable energy, but I wish I didn’t need to go searching to find this out. DigitalOcean need to be a lot more transparent about the energy sources for their hosting facilities.

How slimmed-down websites can cut their carbon emissions - BBC News

Interesting to see an article on web performance on the BBC. Perhaps we should be emphasising green over speed?

Behind the scenes, animation and interaction effects were added using HTML and CSS, two fundamental web languages. That meant there was no need to download large JavaScript files often used to do this on other sites.

How creating a Progressive Web App has made our website better for people and planet

Creating a PWA has saved a lot of kilobytes after the initial load by storing files on the device to reuse on subsequent requests – this in turn lowers the load time and carbon footprint on subsequent page views, making the website better for both people and planet. We’ve also enabled offline access, which significantly improves user experience for people in areas with patchy connections, such as mobile users on their commute.

Website Carbon Calculator – Calculate your websites carbon emissions

Get an idea of how much your website is contributing to the climate crisis.

In total, the internet produces 2% of global carbon emissions, roughly the same as that bad boy of climate change, the aviation industry.

How to Build a Low-tech Website?

This is fascinating! A website that’s fast and nimble, not for performance reasons, but to reduce energy consumption. It’s using static files, system fonts and dithered images. And no third-party scripts.

Thanks to a low-tech web design, we managed to decrease the average page size of the blog by a factor of five compared to the old design – all while making the website visually more attractive (and mobile-friendly). Secondly, our new website runs 100% on solar power, not just in words, but in reality: it has its own energy storage and will go off-line during longer periods of cloudy weather.

Ping! That’s the sound of my brain going “service worker!”

I’ve sent them an email offering my help.

CSS { In Real Life } | Choosing a Green Web Host

Earlier this month, Jeremy Keith posed the question: “How green is my server?”. As Jeremy notes, it’s surprisingly hard to get that information! So how do you ensure that you’re hosting your website on a green server?