Choosing a greener host is something on everybody's mind. If you want to go greener, check out the following criteria to make the right choice:

- Support and responsiveness - In cases like this you’ll appreciate clear communications from a support team, and having access to people with deep expertise – if you’re hosting something for someone, and their business relies on this hosting, it’s worth remembering that the real thing your customers are usually buying, is the ability to avoid disruptive changes to how they work. Local hosting providers should always be considered first (they will use more energy) but make sure the local hosting provider is as green as possible. Sometimes, non-domestic providers are greener than local ones. Here, pick yours and make the best decision depending on your own mindset.

- Pricing - Before going for the pricing, make sure you are absolutely certain of your needs and what you require. Once you know this, try to estimate the amount of storage/computing power you need to optimize your carbon footprint and money. Remember that if you go for a longer period of hosting, the costs per month are lower. Also, all hosting providers offer different kinds of plans. Browse the plans and make the best of their offers.

- Transparency - it’s worth thinking about how the servers you’re going to rely on are powered. If there isn’t an explicit statement from a given company about how they use renewable or sustainable power, it’s safest to assume the company is using a power from a mix of sources. If a company is making statements about green power, then they should be able to share details about how their power is considered “green”. In some cases they might source power directly, operating their own infrastructure, but in many cases, they’ll be buying special ‘renewable energy credits’ – tradable certificates allocated to companies that generate power from renewable sources.

- Green mindset - A greener mindset is always what hosting providers brag about. But careful here, some are green per se, others are just using carbon offsetting processes to "make their hosting green". The idea of paying money to reward green behaviour in a distant place does not sit well with everyone. Generally speaking, if you want to pay for renewable energy credits on the same grid where you are running your servers, you can, but it’s more expensive – just like how buying offsets in the same country where emissions from running servers take place will cost more. If you’re choosing a hosting company that relies on renewable energy credits, ask how & what kind of credits they use, and whether they buy them from the same grid where the infrastructure you use is. If you are not sure about their values, challenge them!

- Standards and contract notices - Before contracting with a hosting provider, read the details of engagement thoroughly. Keep in mind what leaving them would entail. To curb the risk, know that open standards and open source softwares make it easier to run the same kind of site with a different provider, compared to an entirely proprietary stack of technologies – although the trade off you increasingly tend to make now is about the end to end experience of needing something changed, having a developer or site builder work on it, show it in a staging area, then rolling out the changes to your site or product for your users. If you are developing a website on website editors (Wix, Webflow, ...), always remember you will not have the choice in the hosting company, they will make you go for their own provider/solution. And there are generally not green...

Always remember communication is key with your host. Feel free to confirm the information about those offsetting programs with them.

All companies can hold back before either choosing a hosting company or deploying their own infrastructures.
To make this extremely simple (and some cases can prove us wrong here), bigger companies could always consider deploying hybrid infrastructures (public cloud for non-critical data and private cloud for highly valuable data). These hybrid infrastructures can be versatile; they can be internal and monitored by the company itself, but they can also use bulk offers from hosting companies for money-saving, strategic or other purposes. But in the end, huge companies with strong focus on data (banking, retail, ...) should always have a bigger part of their infrastructures owned by themselves. Hyperscaled infrastructures could also be a great asset for them, which is detailed in this category "Choose Adequate Servers Solutions" above.

However, for SME, going through hosting companies is quite the best because they would save money and time creating their own - partly useless (or at best under-used) - infrastructures. This is why choosing a green host could be a great incentive. Sustainable and definitely best for your ressources!