Beyond Green Hosting: How to make your digital life more sustainable

19th Jun 2025

By choosing Green Hosting, our clients have taken an essential step in their digital lives towards reducing their negative environmental impact. Using services like ours, which are powered by renewable energy, means that their website is not contributing to carbon emissions as fossil fuel powered web hosting does. But what about other aspects of our lives?

When we talk about sustainability, we often focus on physical waste, energy-efficient devices or greener transportation. However, as we live increasingly in the digital world, we need to give our online habits more attention.

While choosing a green web host is a great starting point, true digital sustainability goes much deeper. From video consumption to email overload, every online action has a carbon cost. Here are several impactful ways to make your digital life more sustainable, beyond hosting.

1. Recognize that video Is resource-heavy

Video is great, it is a really useful way of communicating in an engaging, accessible and human way. Video content is also the biggest data guzzler on the internet. Not taking into account video streaming for entertainment, we’ll focus on work-based video use here, this still requires significant server power and energy, much of it still sourced from fossil fuels.

What you can do:

• Be selective with uploads. Popping on to social media to give a quick video update can be handy but is it really needed? By considering this, you can avoid uploading unnecessary video content, especially to platforms that automatically loop or play by default.
• Stream video content consciously. Lower resolution when possible, especially on mobile screens.
• How about text or audio instead? Consider if clear and useful text, an accessible infographic or podcast get the message across just as well as a video.
• Don’t eliminate video completely from your marketing production or learning consumption, just use it more intentionally.

2. Be discerning about social media posts

Each social media post, in whatever form, is stored on servers that consume energy around the clock. When billions of users post constantly, the cumulative environmental cost adds up fast.

To avoid using valuable resources and creating digital waste, consider these things before posting:

• Does the post serve a real purpose?
• Could several updates be combined into one?
• Is posting a habit or does it have intention?

Quality over quantity not only helps the environment, it can lead to more meaningful engagement, too.

3. Optimize your website

Inefficient websites packed with bloated scripts, oversized images and unnecessary video or animations use more hosting bandwidth and disk space, increasing load on both the servers and user devices as well as higher power demands on data centres.

Here are some sustainable site design tips:

• Compress images (especially huge photos) and use modern formats (like WebP).
• Minimize use of third-party scripts and auto-loading content.
• Choose lightweight themes and frameworks.
• Use lazy loading and caching to improve efficiency.

Remember that a faster, leaner website isn’t just better for the planet it’s better for your users. It is vital to remember that we are designing for humans. Let’s make sure our web visitors are not left waiting for slow loading pages and their data isn’t being used up by downloading excessive file sizes.

4. De-cluttering emails

Inbox overload isn’t just a mental clutter, it’s an environmental one too. Each email stored translates to the use of physical space and electricity, including the millions of unnecessary marketing emails we receive daily.

Simple steps to clean up:

• Unsubscribe from newsletters that you no longer read.
• Regularly delete or archive old emails, especially those with large attachments.
• Use email services that offer sustainability-focused features or eco-powered servers.
• Automating inbox rules or using inbox cleaner tools can make this process easier.

It might feel like a daunting task if e-mails have built up over time but clearing that space will help it all become more manageable in the future.

5. Use eco-conscious platforms, apps and tools.

Some online services and tools are built with sustainability in mind. Whether it’s a CMS plugin that optimizes performance or a platform powered by renewable energy, choosing eco-conscious technology providers amplifies your impact.

Look for:

• Platforms committed to using renewable energy, like Green Hosting, and find out those who don’t. Perhaps as a valued customer you could encourage them to switch?
• Plugins that optimize your website for speed and efficiency.
• Tools that offer sustainability reports or carbon tracking for digital use.

Choosing technology carefully, with environmental goals in mind is a powerful way to align your digital life with your values.

Applying your environmental choices online can make a real difference

Digital sustainability isn’t about abandoning the internet but it is about using it in a smarter way. From the content we consume and share, to the tools we use and the digital debris we accumulate, every action online has an environmental impact.

Going beyond choosing green hosting to embrace broader digital responsibility is great for the planet as well as your productivity, online presence and how you can make a difference in a meaningful way.