Ever thought about the ecological footprint of your website?

Tuesday 23/08/2022

As an energy guzzler, the ICT sector is responsible for 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. You probably never thought about it, but every website has an ecological footprint. "The development, the up & running, the backup, the updates: that all requires server power," explains Wouter Rummens of Paddle CMS. "By building hundreds of websites on one platform, we can seriously reduce their carbon footprint."

In 2019, the information and communication technology (ICT) sector accounted for 3.7% of global emissions of harmful greenhouse gases. In 2013, the figure was 2.5 %, almost half that. We are talking about more than 450 million tonnes of CO2 in five years*. More extensive than the share of a notorious polluter such as the airline industry. Data centres play an essential role in these emissions. In 2018, the ICT sector already accounted for 6 to 10 % of global electricity consumption. Experts calculated that the data centres in Western Europe alone consume as much electricity as the whole of the Netherlands.

Companies are still little aware that their website also has an impact on global warming.

Many small things make one big. Each website contributes a tiny bit to that gigantic energy consumption. "But the rise of the cloud makes that less visible, of course," says Wouter Rummens. "The consumption of your internal servers used to appear directly on your energy bill, but nowadays, it is included in your subscription. Now the servers are out of sight in large data centres, but they still consume a huge amount of power there."

"When developing a website, when keeping it up and running every day, with every update, those servers have to work. That requires server power every time. Not from one server but several servers because backups are also needed in the cloud. Data centres deduplicate their servers to cope with failures or other malfunctions."

Developing 500 websites on one platform

That is why Paddle built a central CMS platform on which 500 websites have already been developed. "Most of them have largely the same functionalities. Take the search function, for example. Technically speaking, this is the same for almost all of our websites. Behind the scenes, the same mechanism is activated for each search query. It takes a lot of time and server power to develop it. But once that work has been done, you can reuse it perfectly. So, our platform did not have to develop the search function 500 times thoroughly, but only once. The servers only had to run at full speed once."

"We also had to develop other functionalities once. The same goes for testing, deploying, and going live: we only had to do this once without affecting the creativity or individuality of the users. Our work is entirely under the bonnet. The visible part of the website is separate from that."

Central updates and releases

Not only is the website developed on one platform, but the updates are also done centrally. "Every four weeks, all 500 websites running on the Paddle platform receive an update," explains Rummens. "Or faster, if there are urgent security updates, for example. Our platform is built on Drupal. Our developers are also active in the open-source community for which Drupal is known. They are aware of every update."

When you know that every search, every email, every chat conversation puts servers to work, that server power will only have to increase further.

"The other day, we were having dinner with the team when news of a security issue came in. One of our developers did a significant update on the spot from his laptop: 500 websites up to date in one go, and all he had to do was leave his aperitif for a while (laughs). The servers had to work overtime once instead of doing the same update 500 times. That makes a difference in terms of energy consumption.

The future: more data, more server power

Companies are still little aware that their website also impacts global warming, but Wouter Rummens sees this changing in the future. Data centres are also becoming more economical. Not only our hosting partner but also Google, Facebook and others are working on solutions to make them run on renewable energy as much as possible in the future.

"On the other hand, more and more people in all parts of the world are gaining access to the internet. If you know that every search, email, and chat conversation puts servers to work, that server power will only have to increase further. Moreover, consumers are becoming more demanding: websites must always be faster and more efficient. This requires more bandwidth and more server power. The Internet of Things also contributes to this. More and more devices - from factory machines to the refrigerator at home - generate data. It all has to be collected, processed and analysed."

Many small ones make one big

"It is not as if they will suddenly make all the difference with their website," realises Wouter Rummens. "An ecologically friendly website is mainly an unknown factor and can increasingly be part of a total package of measures companies, and organisations take to reduce their ecological footprint. Many small ones make one big one."

"This is also true at Paddle. We have offices in Brussels and Ghent next to the train station. We travel by public transport as much as possible. If that is not possible, we will first see if we can save a car trip with a video call, for example. That is also more efficient. The CMS platform is the same story. Nor is it built purely for ecological reasons. We don't ask users to choose a platform out of idealism. No, it is user-friendly, saves them time, and allows them to reduce their carbon footprint even more.