Does Reliable Green Web Hosting Exist?

Mightybytes has been on a years-long quest to find the perfect green web hosting partner. In this post, we share lessons learned over the years in our efforts to power sites we manage with renewable energy.

Back in 2011, Mightybytes’s first B Corp certification inspired us to dig deeper into company sustainability practices. This went beyond office recycling bins or LED lightbulbs we already used. We reviewed all company processes and policies to identify ways to improve our practices.

In addition to our work on sustainable web design and greening the office, we identified digital supply chain opportunities—including third-party web hosting powered by renewable energy—as meaningful ways to improve the sustainability of both our company and our work for clients.

More importantly, finding values-aligned partners is critical in measurably reducing Scope 3 emissions.

An Epic Quest

Armed with a bit of web host knowledge—and admittedly some naive optimism—we set out on what would turn into an epic, decades-long quest to find a great green web hosting provider with whom we could forge a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship.

We had what we thought were a few simple criteria we needed from a viable partner:

1. A clear, public, and transparent sustainability statement, including a commitment to power their servers with renewable energy
2. Dedication to customer satisfaction with clear partnership criteria
3. An easy-to-administer control panel that would allow us to monitor and adjust the service as needed
4. Security, speed, uptime, and other standard technical requirements

Sure, we also wanted affordable pricing, flexible contracts, and a few other things as well. However, the points above were top priority.

Fifteen years later, we’ve made some progress, but it is painfully clear how much work the industry still has to do! Below are some challenges we’ve run into along this journey.

People, Planet, Pixels, Power

As a digital agency, our supply chain is made up of third-party partners we use to create value for customers and other stakeholders when delivering the services we offer. Website hosting plays a big role in this. Therefore, building a long-lasting relationship with a web hosting provider that powers its servers with renewable energy is a strategically sound decision for us.

Unfortunately, creating and nurturing this partnership hasn’t been easy for a few reasons:

1. The renewable energy landscape is always changing. It can be difficult to keep up with good solutions that meet our criteria.
2. Just because a company makes clear sustainability commitments doesn’t mean it necessarily has the tools and resources to provide the other criteria in our list, such as customer service, security, or reliability.
3. Conversely, clear and transparent sustainability commitments from larger companies are harder to come by, even though they might lead in security, speed, or even customer service.

These roadblocks and others made it challenging to find a good, long-term partner. Unfortunately, since first embarking on this endeavor in 2011, we have started—and subsequently ended—relationships with no less than a dozen green web hosting partners.

Missing Ingredients

To date, most ‘green’ web hosts lack two key components of running a successful business:

1. Reliability
2. Good Customer Service

Unfortunately, these two primary factors caused us to sever relationships with green web hosting partners again and again. What these companies offer in environmental commitments they seem to lack in other important areas.

Here are a few suggestions on how hosting companies might improve their business to better serve customers while also simultaneously growing the renewable energy-powered internet.

Reliability

By far, the most common problem we had when working with these companies was reliability in site uptime. Websites went offline unexpectedly and repeatedly from provider to provider. Without reliable site uptime, no one will want your services. Then it doesn’t matter how clean your energy source is. No one is using it anyway.

Green web hosting providers should focus on making server reliability one of their biggest priorities, doing whatever possible to guarantee the best possible uptime for sites on their servers.

Customer Service

Next, a lack of good customer service went hand-in-hand in with the aforementioned unreliable hosting. In a few cases, it seemed like the support staff was one guy poking around to fix issues in his free time. Not only were many of these companies not able to help us when websites went offline, but they also often seemed genuinely disinterested in doing so.

Also, at least twice, the responses we received were indifferent at best and oftentimes terse, their accompanying suggested solutions ill-conceived. One simple issue took over two weeks to resolve.

This is unacceptable. If these companies want to thrive, they need nothing short of top-notch customer service: professional, responsive, and delivered by experts. Green web hosting providers could learn a few lessons from the examples in this story on Helpscout.

We’ve first hand experience of how hard it can be to get meaningful data about sustainability from large technology service providers. With this report being published we can confidently say we’re not alone.
Even when the law explicitly says sharing this data is mandatory, there’s around a 36% participation rate from companies that own and operate these data centres in Europe. We know of no consequences for not reporting at present.

— The Green Web Foundation, What We’ve Learned About the Sustainability of Data Centres in Europe from the EED

Acknowledging Sustainability Commitments

All this said, the purpose of this post is not to call out green web hosting providers on crappy service. On the contrary—we should band together with them to collectively move toward an internet powered by renewable energy. At least they’re making claims and data publicly available, which is more the exception than the rule these days, unfortunately.

However, viable long-term solutions require all of the above: a competitive offer, good customer service, speed, reliability, security, and transparent sustainability commitments. Companies that downplay sustainability should be publicly called out just as often as those with poor customer service or security.

Green Web Hosting, Greener Internet

The data center market is expected to reach over $650 billion by 2030, nearly doubling in size from 2024. Hyperscale data centers powering artificial intelligence play a significant role in this growth. While some companies have led on the transition to renewable energy, rapid economic growth in the industry displaces any savings gained from these efforts.

Unfortunately, some companies that might have access to renewable energy sources or the funds to build them see RECs and offsets as an easier way out. While a baby step in the right direction, this is more of a marketing ploy that leads to greenwashing than it is a valid, long-term sustainability strategy. For green hosting, this also further confuses an already indifferent public that thinks the internet is a green medium because it replaces paper.

Although we have spent a considerable amount of time and resources on identifying a green host, we have yet to hit the trifecta: a company that is purpose-driven with great customer support and that also happens to be powered by 100% renewables. We won’t stop looking. Our business, clients, and planet depend on it. I know that when we get there, we’ll all win big.

— Andrew Boardman, Mangrove Web Development

The Perfect Storm

When you combine a comparably small number of renewable energy-powered hosting options with unreliable performance and questionable customer service, it is no surprise that few people shift site hosting away from bigger, cheaper, and arguably more stable providers.

Plus, what our experience highlights is that a huge gap exists between the efforts of Big Tech companies to minimize their online impact and what the rest of us are doing to make the web more sustainable.

Moreover, Mightybytes remains committed to hosting our websites on servers powered by renewable energy. We’re not the only ones. There is a growing number of companies looking for better, more sustainable data solutions. Who is willing to step up?