With a #climateemergency in full swing it’s not business as usual. This marks the time that we should all be assessing our environmental impact to see what we can do to improve things. It was with that in mind that we sat down to review our practices.
We already tick some of the big green boxes:
- We work from home,
- eat home cooked food for lunch,
- don’t print anything out unnecessarily,
- we have invested in high-quality equipment which should last years,
- have our heating low and use jumpers when required,
- and we use Ecosia as our default search engine when on the internet (constantly).
But we have identified some big areas for improvement too:
Banking & Web Hosting
Banking
We wouldn’t lend money to a pal who was going to do horrible and selfish things with it so why on earth would we sleepily hand over our hard earned cash to banks with questionable ethics? The honest answer here is time and tradition. But putting each of our practices under the spotlight meant we had to take responsibility for who was holding our money and what they were doing with it. Step in Triodos!
How are the banking features at Triodos?
The amazing thing about Triodos is that they have completely open books, imagine that?! Nothing to hide here because they are ethically sound.
We have switched everything over and it’s been painless. A new card appeared quickly which was made from renewable resources, logging onto digital banking was pain-free! Now just awaiting the transfer date where they switch over any balance and payments from the old account. It thankfully couldn’t be easier!
Web Hosting
Does your choice of web host contribute to climate change?
“It is estimated that the internet could grow to account for 3.5% of global carbon emissions within the next 10 years, at a time when we rapidly need to be reducing emissions from all industries”.
-Kualo
So how green was our current hosting arrangement?
We checked our own website on Website Carbon and found that our website created 3.36g or CO2 per page view. And if we thought that was bad then we were in for a real shock when we checked our side passion Little Green Ways which weighs in at a whopping 18.33g co2 per page view. Little Green Ways is all about empowering people make greener choices – how ironic to have a green website creating so many carbon emissions!
Our hosting service is currently split between two main companies. Siteground and Kinsta.
Kinsta have a thorough green policy. They are full of practical advice on how to reduce the general overhead of a web page and are on Google servers which have been running on entirely renewable energy since 2017.
Happily, our Kinsta sites are already green.
Unfortunately the same could not be said for SiteGround and so a plan of action was required!
“Right now our servers are spread across 5 datacenters across the globe and the current datacenters do not use renewable energy. We do understand the importance of the environmental crisis that we face and we are looking forward to changing our infrastructure. That said, the process takes planning and time, so we could guarantee a smooth transition for all our clients.”
-SiteGround
We investigated several Green Hosting Companies
– before deciding to try Kualo –
Kualo’s whole business is built on green practices from the ground up and it permeates their whole culture. You can read more about how they achieve this on their green policy document.
They provide everything I could hope for technically and have UK based servers – best for achieving good speeds.
Switching from SiteGround to Kualo
The process of switching all clients over is never one to be taken lightly. We didn’t want to sacrifice the speed of our websites or lose the features that allow us to provide a great service to our clients.
Siteground is top rated. The things that we initially loved were their SSD drives, meaning working on their servers were zippy and their inbuilt cacheing and CDN options meant we could produce very fast websites.
The things we grew to hate were their tiered support system, support oscillating wildly between syrupy sweet and completely condescending, glitchy email servers, downright mean processing limits and the real cherry on the top … I wanted a new host with green credentials!
So how have Kualo been?
So far we have been very pleasantly surprised! Any concerns that going green would be a compromise have been happily discarded. The first site on my hit list to transfer was Little Green Ways.
Already we have been delighted by some new features which we never knew we were missing, and a speed test from before and after have shown that actually
Kualo is MUCH faster than Siteground!
Yep, we were so busy worrying about losing speed we didn’t consider that things would actually speed up – dramatically. TTFB stands for Time To First Byte and its the holy grail of fast websites. Kualo is clocking in at 3x the speed of Siteground!
At this stage I’m absolutely delighted to have made the change, so much has felt like a breath of fresh air! But, we’ll leave the comparisons there for now until I’ve really given Kualo a run for its money! 😀
