Everyone's trying their hand at eco-responsible sites. While this won't save the planet, it does help to raise awareness. It's a step in the right direction.
But the aim is to maximize efforts. And while site optimization from the visitor's point of view ("client" side) is often emphasized, server-side optimization and choices are all too often neglected.
Yet hosting is the key to a truly "greener" web, accounting for most of the resource savings you can achieve.
Deciphering. 👇
1 - Customer optimization
This is the best-known and most obvious aspect. It involves reducing the weight of resources sent to visitors, thus improving loading time and reducing the site's carbon footprint.
This focuses on two main points:
- Design: choose optimized themes and plugins to avoid sending massive amounts of fonts and useless JavaScript or CSS code.
- Image optimization: use suitable image formats compressed to modern standards such as "webp", to minimize bandwidth consumption.
But that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Let's move on to the really decisive aspect! 👇
2. Hosting and server resource optimization
This point is often underestimated, yet in my opinion it represents 90% of the impact!
Choice of host 🏭
Hosting companies have a lot of room for maneuver when it comes to going green.
Green electricity, geographical location, heat recovery, type of cooling, choice of sustainable, low-energy machines.
For example, my server provider Hetzner uses 100% of green energy and caseless servers, scalable and durable. 🌱
Fighting robots 🤖
Removing up to 99% of unwanted traffic generated by hacker bots reduces machine power consumption by more than 50%. However, hardly any web hosts apply these filters, as they require additional support to deal with false positives (and, in concrete terms, to unblock customers who repeatedly enter the wrong password, or use plugins making suspicious requests).
This has the added benefit of drastically boosting performance for real users.
I achieve this with attack detection and blocking techniques such as ModSecurity and Fail2ban, which are standard for those most familiar with web hosting system administration.
CPU optimization 🧮
Developers need to write light, fast code, and use high-performance caches like Redis (available on my hosting services), to maximize server efficiency.
What we're talking about here is a factor of 2 to 10 reduction in server CPU usage thanks to a good cache.
It's worth noting that traditional caches that write temporary files to servers are less optimal than Redis, which stores everything in RAM, thus avoiding unnecessary consumption of space and I/O (disk read/write) resources.
Efficient pooling 🫂
Optimized management of servers and sites, based on the above points, avoids wasting physical machines (each server can hold more sites) while ensuring maximum performance for all.
This approach also relies on a close relationship with customers to ensure customized management. For example, if a site is consuming more resources than expected, it may be due to an attack that needs to be blocked, or a concern about site optimization that needs to be brought to the customer's attention, with personalized advice.
Hopefully, you've learned something. In any case, from now on you won't be able to say you didn't know. 🌟👍
A project? Contact me at. 🤝
Or order the perfect accommodation directly from https://portail.lrob.fr/ 🚀
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