How 'green' is your website?

Importance of internet sustainability

The Green Web Foundation exists to encourage transition to a sustainable internet. René and his team do that by gathering information about data centres and hosting service providers that use renewable, or 'green', energy. Their database now covers more than five hundred hosters in sixty-plus countries. Anyone who wants to know whether their website has a green host can use The Green Web Check. All you do is go to thegreenwebfoundation.org and enter your site's URL. Click the 'Check' button and the tool delivers the answer. Although the tool is ultra-simple to use, the technology behind it is pretty complex. As René explains, "To establish whether a hosting service is green, you need information from the service provider. However, the hosting industry is built on multi-layer relationships, with subhosters renting IP addresses from hosters. What we've done therefore is build an open system, where the hosters themselves tell us how to recognise their servers. That might be on the basis of their ASNs or IP ranges, for example."

Small investment with a big impact

Previously known as Cleanbits, The Green Web Foundation has been collecting green energy data since 2006. By making the market more transparent, the Foundation promotes awareness of internet sustainability within the IT sector. "Often, all it takes is a couple of customers asking about energy use to prompt major hosting service providers and others to go green. After all, the cost associated with going green is relatively low, so businesses don't have much to lose." The website-based checking tool isn't the only service The Green Web Foundation provides. An app and a browser extension are also available for download, for example. With the browser extension installed, you get to see in real time which websites have green hosts and which links on a web page lead to green-hosted websites. The ones that do are highlighted by green dashed underscoring. So too are links to green-hosted sites in search engine results. For anyone who wants to take things a step further, there's a dedicated search engine at searx.thegreenwebfoundation.org, jointly developed by Searx and The Green Web Foundation. Finally, the Foundation makes its API and datasets available to people developing new tools and services, and for analysis and research. Hosting service providers and other and web companies can also sign up as partners.

Development capability supported by SIDN Fund

Having worked with SIDN in the past, The Green Web Foundation is now benefiting from the support of SIDN Fund. A grant from the Fund is enabling René and his team to further develop their services. "Our browser add-on now processes an average of ten million URLs a day. At peak times, there are a thousand requests a second. We currently handle all requests via a single portal, although not all require real-time processing. The plan is therefore to divide the API in two. That should mean faster processing of real-time requests, so that we're still meeting modern speed requirements next year. Meanwhile, there'll be a second, 'slow' portal for bulk requests. We envisage that as being for the likes of research centres, who sometimes want millions of URLs checked at one go. Bulk requests will undergo more extensive database checking, and we'll then be able to provide the people submitting them with more detailed responses. We can include information about hosting firms, for example." "The Green Web Foundation project isn't like most of the Pioneer Projects we fund," says Marieke van der Kruijs, Project Coordinator at SIDN Fund. "It involves technical upscaling with a view to increasing daily check processing capacity, rather than something entirely new, like most of the others. We nevertheless believe it deserves support, because of the excellent match with the Fund's objective of contributing to a strong internet, which implies a sustainable internet."

Ultimate goal

"Of course, our ultimate goal is to make ourselves redundant," explains René. In principle, if the internet goes over completely to renewable energy, The Green Web Foundation won't be needed any more. However, René sees the current campaign as just the start. "Energy use is a major factor in the climate crisis, but it's certainly not the only one." Indeed, the United Nations has defined seventeen Sustainable Development Goals, covering things such as decent work and gender equality. "The Green Web Foundation is increasing the transparency of the system. And I'm a great believer that transparency drives change. In time, our hope is that companies will adopt a similar stance on other aspects of their services, in line with the Sustainable Development Goals. It's great that, for example, the websites of companies such as Apple run on green energy, but until their plants in China do the same, there's a long way to go." Want to know whether your website is green? Are you a hosting service provider who wants to learn more? Visit The Green Web Foundation's website for more information.