Carbon neutral hosting

[zcorpan]

We (Bocoup) are currently reviewing climate impact for different web hosting providers. I couldn't find any statements from DigitalOcean, but found this https://www.mutual.agency/blog/is-digitalocean-green-hosting/ -- has this been taken into consideration already, and if not, is it possible to select data centers that are green?

[foolip]

We're in the process of tweaking the hosting for all of our static stuff, is there an alternative that's already carbon neutral? AWS S3 is the option we're currently considering.

[mariestaver]

Hi @foolip ! There are four customer regions in AWS that are carbon-neutral (through buybacks) right now, so if you stay with S3, using them may be a good option. From their page:

"AWS purchases and retires environmental attributes, like Renewable Energy Credits and Guarantees of Origin, to cover the non-renewable energy we use in these regions:

U.S. West (Oregon)
GovCloud (U.S. West)
Europe (Frankfurt)
Canada (Central)
Europe (Ireland)"

Azure and GCP have been ranked more sustainable than AWS overall in my limited research, but we're still looking at options.

[foolip]

Out of those regions, Canada (Central) seems the most promising geographically, it seems to be in Montreal. We've tended to host things on the American east coast before, as a sort of compromise between American west coast and Europe.

[jgraham]

So on the one hand, I'm pretty sure that WHATWG's static hosting energy usage is so low that there's no real impact in the choices you make here. On the other I'm pretty skeptical about schemes like Renewable Energy Credits; I'm not an expert but I haven't figured out what the mechanism is that causes the money to end up in renewables or other meaningful emissions reductions schemes; naively it seems like a secondary market here is telling you something about the marketing value of appearing to be environmentally friendly rather than in anything actually beneficial. But links appreciated if anyone has a good explaination of what I'm missing. Similarly I'd be wary of anything advertising offsets on the basis of carbon capture unless the mechanism for capture is actually well understood and credible (e.g. not the promise to plant trees that will either never happen or where the trees will be cut down after a few years, or whatever).