Green (renewable powered) website hosting
The Ethial Agency is proud to be the Green Web Foundation’s only South African and African verified green website hosting provider.
As a specialist WordPress website development agency we take care of 100% of your domain management and website hosting needs. The truth is, our insatiable desire for everything digital and our business requirements to be visible online does come at a cost. The millions of servers and data centres around the world all use energy which is fuelling our dependency on fossil fuels and increasing manufacturing in ways never seen before. In short, having a website and a social media pages is contributing to global warming.
You cannot control much of where the energy used to produce your products and services come from – you can, however, choose green website hosting. We offer this eco-friendly website hosting service to both South African and international clients.
Why you should host your website with green website hosting.
The website hosting industry is producing more environmental pollution than the airline industry – let that one sink in. The biggest reason to go green!
- A webserver produces more C02 annually than a car – let that one sink in too…
- Combined, data centres use more energy than multiple nuclear plants – and that is just in the U.S.A.
- Most data centres are pulling energy directly from the electricity grid, which is mostly powered by fossil fuels.
- Using renewable energy to host your website will promote your brand reputation – projecting your green credentials will say a lot about your organisation.
- Ditch the sleeping pills – you’ll get a much better night’s rest knowing your website isn’t contributing to harming our planet!
Green website hosting, South Africa
The choice is yours
If you are about to commission a website or would consider moving your existing one, we hope that you go the green route and choose a provider who can supply green website hosting for your website.
How do we do it?
We calculate an estimated annual electricity usage for the web server(s) that host our client’s websites, and we purchase one year’s renewable energy in advance to offset that usage. Do we have a wind turbine powering the building where our web servers are housed? No. It is not possible to purchase green electricity, and direct it in the electricity grid to a specific building. We purchase renewable electricity from Darling Wind Farm in the Western Cape, thereby contributing to the green economy in South Africa and adding clean electricity to an otherwise, and mostly dirty grid.
In addition we use a content delivery network to deliver a website’s content to every corner of the globe, quickly and sustainably using CloudFlare. Their goal is simple: help build a better, greener Internet with no carbon emissions that is powered by renewable energy. You can follow CloudFlare’s own impressive emission offset updates.
> VIEW: The Ethical Agency’s current electricity certificate
> VIEW: data on renewable energy claims
Our digital marketing services
Digital marketing
Leading digital marketing agency – digital marketing strategies & campaigns: social media, web, SEO, PPC, content creation & reporting.
Branding and graphic design
High quality branding and graphic design for digital and print. Specialising in branding, publications and digital design.
Website design & development
THE STATISTICS: "Nearly every action performed on the internet has the cost of a resultant carbon emission: making a Google search emits .2g of CO2, watching a YouTube video for only 10 minutes emits 1g of CO2, and simply owning a Gmail account for a year emits 1200g of CO2.
Unfortunately the inner-workings of all the data connections taking place each time we click are hidden from view and it’s difficult to truly comprehend the magnitude of scale when it comes to energy usage, technological production, electronic disposal and all that goes along with it. To quote Al Gore, “It really is an inconvenient truth.” Some scary reading below:
- TIME: Your Data Is Dirty: The Carbon Price of Cloud Computing
- The Guardian: How viral cat videos are warming the planet
- The environmental impacts of server hosts
- It isn’t just the servers one need to consider, it’s all the peripheral requirements of packaging, maintenance, and disposal etc. You can read on article on 8 Ways Data Center Environmental Impact Goes Beyond Emissions
- The Environmental Toll of a Netflix Binge
Satisfied client testimonials
