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.
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:
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:
Quality over quantity not only helps the environment, it can lead to more meaningful engagement, too.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
Choosing technology carefully, with environmental goals in mind is a powerful way to align your digital life with your values.
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.
6th Feb 2025
On June 28th 2025 the European Accessibility Act (EAA) comes into force. The Act aims to ensure equitable access to online digital services (including websites) and products for users in the European Union. It applies to any business that provides products and services to consumers in the EU, wherever the business is based. This means that it applies to UK businesses.
See our previous article 'Website accessibility - what, why and how' for more details on what web accessibility means, why it is important and ways to make your website more accessible.
Previously, legislation based around website accessibility has been aimed mainly at Public Sector bodies but the EAA focusses on the private sector. It applies to businesses who trade in the EU, who are based outside of the EU but sell products and services within the EU and who have at least 10 employees and a turnover of €2 million.
Whilst the EAA may not apply to some smaller businesses and individuals, we believe that all website owners should be working towards a more accessible internet. As in other areas of society, many people are disadvantaged in the digital world due to unequal access to information, services and products. Older people, disabled people and those without access to fast internet services will all benefit from websites that are designed and created to accessibility standards.
Find more detailed information about the European Accessibility Act at:
European Union
European Commission
Ability Net
Gov.uk - understanding accessibility requirements
5th Jul 2024
Making your website as accessible to as many people as possible is an aim many website owners want to achieve but may feel that implementation is too technical. So here's a breakdown of what website accessibility is, why it is important and steps website owners can take without any web design knowledge or experience.
What is website accessibility?Website accessibility means having a website that can be visited and used by as many people as possible, including disabled people - People who have motor difficulties or vision, cognitive or hearing impairment, who are blind or deaf or have a learning disability for example. In reality it covers a vast range of diverse people and the devices they use.
Just like accessibility of any other service, product or environment it is about creating an inclusive and equitable space where people who have disabilities can access the same or similar information as everyone else.
According to the disability equality organisation Scope, there are 16 million disabled people in the UK. That is almost a quarter of the population. Aside from the ethical considerations, why would we want to potentially exclude a quarter of prospective visitors from our websites?
Website accessibility regulations came into force in 2018 for public bodies and all UK websites are required to make 'reasonable adjustments' to make their websites accessible under the 2010 Equality Act. There is more in-depth information about legal requirements for UK websites at the .Gov website.
This is not an exhaustive list but it describes the main, non-technical actions you can take as a website owner.
Start with your visual branding.
This can happen before your website even exists. Having a visual brand that uses accessible colours will have a knock on effect across all of your marketing materials, not just your website. If you're hiring a brand designer to create this for you then make sure they understand the issues, especially colour contrast. Low contrasting text colours are a very common item that will fail accessibility checks. Simply speaking, if the text doesn't contrast strongly enough against its background then some people will not be able to see or read it. Are My Colours Accessible is a great tool where you can test this or experiment to help you to understand contrast ratios.
Choosing your wording
Keep your language simple and straightforward. Unless your website contains technical information for a very specific audience, there is no need to over complicate it. Write for people first, rather than for search engines.
Take care with your photos and images.
Never use text in images to convey important information (such as a picture of a poster containing event information or contact details). People using text reader software to access your website content cannot 'see' text in images. If you do put informative text inside an image, add this as actual text too.
Always add alternative text to describe the image for people who cannot see the image visually.
Transcripts and descriptions for audio and video is essential.
Videos are great and who doesn't love a podcast? If you are using these types of media remember to provide subtitles, a transcript and/or written description for deaf or hearing impaired people or users who cannot hear the video/audio content. Provide audio descriptions for people who are blind, have a vision impairment or cannot see the video for another reason.
Headings are not decoration
Use headings to separate and structure your content, not to style your page. Headings used appropriately (i.e. heading 1 first, followed by heading 2s and so on) are useful for non-visual users to skip through your content quickly to find what they need.
Text for links provides useful information
Put link text in context. For example, instead of creating a link to another page using just the word ‘here’, add the link to more descriptive text such as ‘our calendar of events here’. Consider, would the text of the link make sense if it stood alone?
Remember the interactive parts of your website
The complexity of this varies depending on the function or feature and this where you may need a professional web developer's expertise. For example a more complex feature may be your website's forms which need to be properly structured, labelled correctly and consistent. A more simple feature may be a button, which should be large enough to click/tap and far enough away from other interactive elements that very fine and precise movement isn't required to hit it.
PDFs count too
In most circumstances your PDFs also need to meet accessibility standards. There are some exceptions, especially for non-essential documents created before September 2018.
Design for multiple devices
Your website should be equally usable on the small screen of a mobile phone and other size screens, through to a large desktop screen. This is website responsiveness and is built into the design and coding of your site. If you're not sure, check with your web designer that your website is responsive.
The technical details
There are more technical aspects to creating an accessible website and even if you are not developing the website yourself, it is empowering to understand them. Talk this over with your web developer and ask them how they build accessibility into their websites and how they conduct accessibility testing.
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - pages about website accessibility
The Web Accessibility Initiative
UK Government guidance on understanding website accessibility requirements
UK Government guidance on doing a basic accessibility check
Are My Colours Accessible? tool
18th Apr 2024
A huge congratulations to League Against Cruel Sports on the first anniversary of their Business Without Bloodsports campaign. We, along with many other businesses joined a year ago to pledge that we will not support or promote bloodsports of any kind, now or in the future.
In fact this is something that we already had built into our business’s core values from the day we founded Make Hay web design and Green Hosting nearly 20 years ago. Our ethical policy, which outlines the kinds of activities we love to support via our services and those we do not wish to profit from, has included bloodsports as something we irrefutably do not support since the beginning. And so now being able to officially lend our voice, along with the League Against Cruel Sports and other businesses, to speak up against this horrific activity is something we are delighted to do.
You too can make your pledge to never support or promote bloodsports via your business.
Being able to support an organisation that makes a real difference to animals that suffer in the name of ‘sport’ is what really matters. Through their hard work, dedication and perseverance League Against Cruel Sports makes things happen through their collaboration with other organisations and law enforcement, by offering education and research and in maintaining nature reserves for wildlife, as well as so much more in their campaigns and awareness raising.
We wish you continued success, League Against Cruel Sports, alongside your allies and supporters until animal cruelty is a thing of the past. Thank you for everything you do.
8th Feb 2024
Last March we wrote about why we continue to support Renewable World, a charity which tackles povery and climate change through off-grid, renewable energy solutions for low-income individuals, families and communities in remote places.
Since their inception in 2008, alongside the people they work with, they have made some remarkable achievements. The impact they have is tangible, lasting and sustainable and we go into more detail about our decision to donate to them in our Impact section.
We know that it is important to our clients that we spend the money we make via our business in a responsible and ethical manner. It's why we have an ethical policy. And so here's a quick update on Renewable World's activities in the past year:
You can read Renewable World's full annual report here.
By 2026 their aim is to empower over 200,000 people to transform their lives through clean, affordable, and reliable energy. And they will be on track to transform the lives of over 500,000 people by 2030. We can't wait to see this happen!
Green Hosting works handsomely with:
Auto-installer now available on all accounts
