The hostingHostingA web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web. team works to improve WordPress’ end-user experience across hosting environments through industry collaboration and user education.
Want to contribute? Come join us!
The team meets in the #hostingSlackSlackSlack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. channel each week on Wednesday at 0900 UTC and 1800 UTC. Check out local times at make/meetings.
As the internet grows, so does the environmental impact of hostingHostingA web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web. websites. Sustainable web hostingHostingA web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web. helps to reduce carbon emissions and improves energy efficiency. Here are some key factors to consider when selecting a sustainable hosting provider and best practices for reducing the environmental footprint of web hosting.
Using energy-efficient servers and cooling systems and consolidating underutilized servers is important to a host’s sustainability efforts. The biggest improvement to hosting in the past decade is using virtualization to reduce physical serverServerA server is a piece of computer hardware or software that provides functionality for other programs or devices. Typical servers are database servers, file servers, mail servers, print servers, web servers, game servers, and application servers. needs. Using SSDs (Solid-State Drives) instead of HDDs (Hard Disk Drives) also increases energy efficiency. To further reduce energy consumption, hosting providers can implement cloud hosting and serverless architectures to allocate resources dynamically based on demand.
Hosting providers can reduce their environmental impact by powering or utilizing data centers with renewable energy sources. Investing in renewable energy sources like solar, wind, or hydroelectric power can substantially improve the environmental impact.
Data centers with green certifications (e.g., LEED, ISO 50001) are optimized for energy efficiency. Providers can also select data centers in cooler climates like Iceland to minimize cooling needs.
Where possible, offer region-specific hosting options to minimize data transfer. Educate customers to understand the benefits of local data centers. Add a CDNCDNA Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance by distributing the service spatially relative to end users. CDNs have grown to serve a large portion of the Internet content today, including web objects (text, graphics and scripts), downloadable objects (media files, software, documents), applications (e-commerce, portals), live streaming media, on-demand streaming media, and social media sites. to accommodate international traffic in an efficient manner.
Sustainability efforts should go beyond data centers and servers. If you’re using an office, make sure that your office building is green and energy efficient. Implement recycling programs within your offices, use energy-efficient lightning and encourage paperless operations. Promote remote work to reduce overall carbon footprint associated with daily commutes and office energy consumption.
Effective data management practices help reduce the storage footprint of web hosting. Using incremental backupsBackupA backup is a copy of computer data taken and stored elsewhere so that it may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. Backups can be used to recover data after its loss from data deletion or corruption, or to recover data from an earlier time. Backups provide a simple form of disaster recovery. avoids unnecessary data storage. Regularly archiving or deleting unused data and optimizing databases and storage systems minimize redundancy. Implementing data minification and image compression technologies can improve data management and decrease the storage footprint of individual websites.
Optimizing performance is crucial for reducing server load and energy consumption. Hosting providers can implement server-side cachingCacheA cache is a component that stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster; the data stored in a cache might be the result of an earlier computation or a copy of data stored elsewhere. (e.g. RedisRedisRedis (Remote Dictionary Server) is an in-memory data structure store, in-memory key–value database. It is open-source software.. or MemcachedMemcachedMemcached is a general-purpose distributed memory-caching system. It is often used to speed up dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in RAM to reduce the number of times an external data source must be read. Memcached is free and open-source software.) to minimize databaseDatabaseA database is an organized collection of data. Access to this data is usually provided by a "database management system" (DBMS) consisting of an integrated set of computer software that allows users to interact with one or more databases and provides access to all of the data contained in the database. Because of the close relationship between them, the term "database" is often used casually to refer to both a database and the DBMS used to manipulate it. queries and CPU usage. Static and dynamic caching can be added for reducing server usage for static and dynamic content like HTMLHTMLHypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. HTML describes the structure of a web page semantically and originally included cues for the appearance of the document. and PHPPHPPHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a general-purpose scripting language especially suited to web development. PHP code is usually processed on a web server by a PHP interpreter. On a web server, the result of the interpreted and executed PHP code would form the whole or part of an HTTP response., reducing RAMRAMRandom-access memory (RAM) is a form of computer memory that can be read and changed in any order, typically used to store working data and machine code. and CPU usage. Offer built-in performance optimization for WordPress like minification, data cleanup and image compression.
Raise awareness with your customers around the impact of security on everything. Hackers and dangerous bots can overload your servers and generate unwanted power and data impacts. We recommend to at least use a tool like WP Scan or Pathstack to make sure you are aware of vulnerability and can reactReactReact is a JavaScript library that makes it easy to reason about, construct, and maintain stateless and stateful user interfaces. https://reactjs.org/. to it.
Servers and hardware should be managed responsibly by keeping it as long as possible, using it as efficiently as possible, making sure it is certified, and purchasing long-lifespan products. Once they reach their end-of-life make sure to recover, recycle, and upcycle.
Testing and staging environments are nice and great to have around – if your customers actually use them. Make sure your customers can easily create and destroy those environments so they feel safe to not keep them around. Each unused environment still consumes storage and computing space, even if there is no traffic to the application.
There are many ways a hosting company can improve its environmental impact. Charities and companies like https://onetreeplanted.org and https://theoceancleanup.com provide a great way to help compensate for impacts, considering that the first priority should be to avoid and reduce them.
Educate your customers about the importance of sustainable web hosting and what they can do to improve their own site’s footprint. Provide educational resources like tutorials, webinars and interactive tools measuring websites’ footprint and suggesting tips to improve site efficiency.
Sustainability is an ongoing commitment. Hosting providers should regularly audit their energy, water, and waste management practices and continually stay updated on the latest technologies to improve their environmental performance.
