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Switching to a greener hosting provider

How to check a hosting or CDN claim about renewable energy before moving traffic, and what the evidence can actually support.

4 tools in this scenario · verified 2026-10-27

A hosting switch is one of the few sustainability changes a small team can make without touching its product, which is why the claim is everywhere and the evidence is thin. Providers describe their position in several different ways: matching consumption with renewable energy certificates, buying regional power contracts, operating in a grid that is already low carbon, or buying carbon offsets that have nothing to do with the electricity used. Only the first three describe the electricity behind a request. The Green Web Foundation keeps a public dataset of providers with documented green electricity and exposes a check that returns the status for a given domain, which makes it possible to test a shortlist before any migration work starts. Beyond the certificate, the questions that matter are where the data centres sit, whether the provider reports a PUE or a carbon figure per region, and whether the CDN edge is covered by the same claim as the origin. The criteria below turn those questions into a checklist that survives a marketing page.

What to evaluate

  1. 1

    What the renewable claim covers

    Establish whether the claim is about electricity for servers only, or also for cooling, edge and network. A certificate that covers the origin while the CDN is excluded is a partial claim, and should be read as one.

  2. 2

    Contract versus certificate versus offset

    PPAs and regional green tariffs change what power is bought; certificates assign attributes; offsets compensate elsewhere. Only the first two change the electricity used by the workload on the local grid.

  3. 3

    Region-level reporting

    Ask for a carbon figure or grid intensity per region you would actually deploy to, not a company-wide average. Migrating a service to a low-carbon region can matter more than the provider's global claim.

  4. 4

    Third-party verification

    Check the provider appears in an independently maintained dataset, and whether the claim is audited yearly. A page that cites a certificate without a reporting period is not verifiable.

  5. 5

    Total cost of the move

    Compare egress, reserved capacity and region availability alongside the sustainability claim. A greener provider whose egress pricing changes the architecture may raise total energy rather than lower it.

Tools for this scenario

All tools

Sustainable Cloud

Green Web Foundation

Non-profit registry and free tools for checking whether a website or host actually runs on green energy.

Pricing
Free
Compliance
Not stated
Platforms
Web, API
Verified 2026-10-27Read the record

Sustainable Cloud

GreenPT

European AI chat and API running open-source models on renewable energy, with EU or US inference.

Pricing
Subscription
Compliance
Not stated
Platforms
Web, API, Cloud
Verified 2026-10-27Read the record

Sustainable Cloud

Cloud Carbon Footprint

Open-source tool for measuring and reducing cloud emissions across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.

Pricing
Free
Compliance
Not stated
Platforms
Cloud, On-premise
Verified 2026-10-22Read the record

Carbon-Aware Computing

CO2.js

JavaScript library for estimating the carbon emissions of digital services and website visits.

Pricing
Free
Compliance
Not stated
Platforms
Web
Verified 2026-10-22Read the record

Sources

Last verified 2026-10-27. Figures on the linked tools are checked against the sources above; confirm pricing and compliance coverage before signing.