What you'll find in this article
When we write an email, make a video call, or chat, we perform actions that have now become part of our daily lives. But these actions are not without social costs. The Internet consumes as much as a country, the fourth in the world after China, the United States, and India. The web has made our lives easier, but at the same time, it has brought additional environmental costs that are very high.
Every search we perform on the Internet releases up to 2 grams of CO2 into the atmosphere. American and Italian studies have established that a server can produce up to 5 tons of carbon dioxide. The energy consumption of a data center is equivalent to 1% of global energy demand. The data centers that host websites join the clouds we use every day in this consumption. Messaging apps like WhatsApp or Telegram can produce 50 grams of CO2. By sending 20 messages a day for a year, we reach the same consumption as cars that have traveled 1,000 kilometers.
Virtuous behaviors
From 2018 to 2020, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google emitted more tons of CO2 than the Czech Republic. Moving in the opposite direction and investing in renewable energy has become mandatory. When we create a site and publish it on the Internet, it needs to be fast and efficient to ensure it consumes less. We must reduce the amount of resources used and ensure that the files we use are actually necessary, eliminating useless ones, and optimize images by reducing their weight (this can be done without compromising quality). Having a site that gets straight to the point and allows for agile navigation is fundamental. It has also become important from a SEO positioning perspective. Eco-sustainability goes hand in hand with usability and positioning thanks to content that is made easy to find, better information architecture, and the optimization of Core Web Vitals.Investing in renewable energy while lowering environmental costs
Many hosting giants are using the green path as a standard commercial proposal worldwide. Yet, in Italy, there is not yet a widespread presence of service providers with these characteristics, unlike, for example, the Netherlands and Germany. Foundations like The Green Web Foundation allow for a reliable check to understand if our site uses fossil or renewable energy. As a concrete commitment to this issue, No Digital Brain pledges to use exclusively green hosting for clients who want to transfer their site to us. How much does it cost? Nothing. The hosting service is provided free of charge to all clients who purchase any WordPress support and maintenance package. Like green hosting, we seek to promote eco-sustainable digitalization. This is possible not only by using renewable energy sources, using raw materials that have a low environmental impact, and leveraging the principles of the circular economy, but also through valuable initiatives. Every site we manage will further offset CO2 emissions thanks to a new tree planted on Treedom and entrusted to the client, who can monitor its growth and progress on a dedicated web page.
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