Going Green: Our Journey to Sustainable Hosting
In an era of growing environmental awareness, more and more companies are looking for ways to reduce their impact on the environment. At Ratioweb, we prioritize sustainable development by choosing hosting solutions powered by green energy. As a result, we minimize CO₂ emissions and actively contribute to protecting the planet.
IT and global warming: Can hosting be green?
Information technology is developing at a rapid pace, but its impact on the environment is often underestimated. It is estimated that the global IT infrastructure is responsible for approximately 3–4% of CO₂ emissions worldwide, putting it on par with the aviation industry. As information technology continues to advance, this share is expected to increase. It is also worth noting that around half of the emissions in this sector come from data centers.
According to the KPMG report (Chasing Net Zero: Are the ICT sector plans on track?) and The Shift Project study (Lean ICT Report), the growing demand for digital services requires actions to make them more environmentally friendly.
In the European Union, regulations are being introduced to reduce the carbon footprint of the IT sector. The Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) and the European Green Deal promote more sustainable solutions in the technology sector, including green hosting.
Technology in service of the planet – Our actions
As a small business (SME), our environmental impact is not very significant. However, we are aware of global trends and want to be prepared for future challenges. Moreover, environmental protection is particularly important to us and constitutes a key principle of our organization’s manifesto.
How does this look in practice? We use external data centers to manage our test environments, company infrastructure, and production servers for clients. In total, we manage clusters of dozens of machines, load balancers, and private networks. As our company continues to grow dynamically, the demand for IT infrastructure resources is increasing, which means our environmental impact is also rising.
That’s why, as part of our cloud services, we have partnered with a provider that meets our high standards for ecology and sustainability while ensuring data processing within the EU. Our choice fell on Hetzner.
Hetzner – A Green Energy-Powered Data Center
Our servers are hosted in Hetzner data centers, which rely exclusively on renewable energy sources such as wind and hydro power. Since 2008, Hetzner has powered its data centers in Germany with hydroelectric energy, and since 2018, its server park in Finland has been operating on both wind and hydro energy. The company strives for maximum energy efficiency by implementing innovative technologies that reduce energy consumption.
Additionally, Hetzner extends the lifecycle of its servers by reusing and reselling them, which helps limit electronic waste. Its optimized cooling systems utilize natural air cooling for 98% of the year, further reducing energy consumption. With a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ratio of 1.10 to 1.16, Hetzner ranks among the most energy-efficient hosting providers in the world.
Energy savings with a scalable infrastructure
Our infrastructure is based on automation of CI/CD processes. To optimize energy consumption, we use Hetzner solutions, such as the Fleeting Plugin for GitLab CI, which enables dynamic scaling of worker machine clusters based on our team’s current demand.
This ensures efficient resource utilization, keeping energy consumption to a minimum outside developers’ working hours. We are currently planning to further expand the scope of automatic scaling so that our infrastructure can better adapt to actual operational needs. Additionally, we aim to implement intelligent load management mechanisms, which will ultimately help us further reduce our carbon footprint.
Website optimization and CO₂ emissions
To minimize our environmental impact, we have optimized our website ratioweb.pl to reduce its carbon footprint. According to a test conducted with the Website Carbon Calculator, our website produces fewer emissions than 82% of other websites. This means that by using our service, visitors contribute to reducing the Internet's carbon footprint. One visit to our website generates only 0.18 g of CO₂.
Green hosting – A small step, a big impact
Every website requires energy to operate, and choosing a hosting provider has a significant environmental impact. A conscious approach to technology can effectively reduce CO₂ emissions and support global efforts toward sustainable development. That’s why we continuously work on enhancing the energy efficiency of our services and implementing eco-friendly solutions.
Your website, a smaller carbon footprint
If you're looking for green energy-powered hosting, get in touch with us! We’ll be happy to help you implement sustainable solutions tailored to your needs.
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