How can server hosting be made greener?

Server hosting is an integral part of digital infrastructure—but it comes with a hefty environmental cost.

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Data centers, which house servers, consume vast amounts of energy to operate and cool the servers. Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology revealed that the cloud currently has a larger carbon footprint than the entire airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes.

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The environmental impact of server hosting extends beyond energy consumption. The production and disposal of server hardware contribute to resource depletion and electronic waste. Therefore, addressing the environmental impact of server hosting is crucial as digital usage continues to grow.

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Let’s take a look at why greener server hosting is so important and how digital asset management (DAM) solutions can help an organization achieve this.

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• The Importance of Greener Server Hosting
• Load Optimization for Energy Efficiency
• Centralization of Image Conversion
• Removal of Obsolete Data
• Utilizing Cold Storage for Infrequently Accessed Data
• Advance Your Sustainability Efforts With DAM

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The Importance of Greener Server Hosting

The environmental impact of digital assets is driving the need for greener server hosting practices for several reasons:

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1. Global Sustainability Goals: Aligning with global sustainability goals, such as the Paris Agreement, requires significant reductions in carbon emissions across all sectors, including digital infrastructure. Greener server hosting contributes to these goals by minimizing energy consumption and carbon output.

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2. Consumer and Stakeholder Expectations: Today’s consumers and stakeholders are increasingly eco-conscious and expect businesses to adopt sustainable practices. Companies that fail to address their digital carbon footprint risk losing trust and credibility.

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3. Future Environmental Regulations: Governments worldwide are implementing stricter environmental regulations to combat climate change. Adopting greener server hosting practices ensures compliance with these regulations and prepares organizations for future legislative requirements.

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As organizations strive to meet global sustainability goals and respond to growing consumer expectations, the need for practical solutions to reduce carbon footprint is more pressing than ever.

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One such solution is optimizing server load. By minimizing the demands placed on servers, businesses not only improve the performance and reliability of their websites—they also reduce energy consumption.

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Load Optimization for Energy Efficiency

Load optimization is about reducing the demand placed on a website’s server. When the server is overloaded, it can slow down and lead to poor performance—and a poor user experience for customers, which damages brand loyalty.

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One of the main causes of high server load is too much user traffic. Another is too many applications and processes running in the background. For example, your brand's website may require multiple variations of a single image to ensure it’s responsive and optimized for different devices and screen sizes. This could include thumbnails, circular images, and different file formats like WebP to ensure fast loading times and a seamless user experience.

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If you're executing an omnichannel strategy, the need for varied formats and sizes increases exponentially. Traditionally, this would mean creating and storing numerous file versions, each tailored to a specific use case.

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Not only does this consume significant storage space, but it also overloads the server—both of which have a negative environmental impact. Not to mention that an overloaded server may struggle to process user requests efficiently, leading to errors, timeouts, or even service disruptions. This can undermine the reliability of a website and erode user trust.

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With Wedia’s Media Delivery and Digital Experience, an optimized Content Delivery Network (CDN) speeds up the delivery of web content by using a server closest to the user. With its Content Picker, you can easily transform images without needing professional tools or extensive storage space for multiple versions. All you have to do is change the URL parameters according to your requirements.

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This approach streamlines content delivery and significantly reduces the server load, helping companies lower their digital footprint and contribute to greener, more sustainable server hosting practices.

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Centralization of Image Conversion

Image conversion is a resource-intensive process that can be optimized to reduce environmental impact. Centralizing image conversion processes within a DAM system like Wedia offers significant benefits, including reduced redundancy, lower energy use, and enhanced operational efficiency.

Centralizing image conversion means that images are processed in a single, optimized environment rather than across multiple, disparate systems.

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For larger brands dealing with a substantial volume of image files, using an enterprise DAM tool like Wedia is crucial. Wedia’s DAM automates the process of producing responsive image variations at scale, automatically compressing images while balancing quality and loading time. This ensures efficient use of resources and faster delivery of content.

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Additionally, Wedia’s DAM system suggests relevant alt text, optimizing the image metadata for search engines. By centralizing and optimizing image conversion, Wedia helps companies minimize their digital carbon footprint while maintaining high performance and a great user experience.

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Removal of Obsolete Data

Obsolete data not only clutters digital storage but also consumes valuable energy resources. It includes files that are no longer needed, duplicates, and outdated versions of documents. These files take up space and require energy to maintain, even though they serve no purpose and have a significant environmental impact.

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Wedia offers robust tools for identifying and removing obsolete data. Inside the DAM dashboard, users are given a sustainability score and actionable insights to improve their environmental efficiency. By removing unused, duplicate, or expired assets, users can increase their sustainability score and see a meaningful representation of the storage they’ve freed up. For example, 423 MB of saved storage is equivalent to the size of 8 Taylor Swift albums!

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This proactive approach to data management reduces server load, improves overall system performance, and minimizes an organization’s environmental impact.

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Utilizing Cold Storage for Infrequently Accessed Data

A hot (or online) storage system is connected to the internet. In a cold storage system, assets are rarely accessed on lower-power servers or completely offline.

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Cold storage solutions are ideal for archival data, backup files, and other long-term storage needs. By moving infrequently accessed data to cold storage, organizations can significantly reduce the energy required to maintain their digital assets.

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How A Sustainable DAM Provider Supports Greener Hosting

One of the key things to look for when choosing a sustainable DAM solution is not just what they say—but how they’ve designed their own product.

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For example, at Wedia we focus on an eco-design-based approach to our product, which means taking environmental issues into account right from the design phase.

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The lifecycle of an image within a DAM system exemplifies the principles of eco-friendly design. From selecting energy-efficient storage options like SSDs instead of traditional HDDs, to maximizing server efficiency and reducing data transfer, sustainability is prioritized at every stage.

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This process concludes with the delivery of images that are carefully compressed and resized, maintaining high quality while reducing server load and environmental impact. For example, an 8MB PSD file is transformed into an image that is perfectly sized to meet the specific needs of the user, whether it's for e-commerce, a website, or social media.

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Advance Your Sustainability Efforts With DAM

As the digital world continues to grow, so does the need for sustainable server hosting practices. By implementing load optimization, centralizing image conversion, removing obsolete data, and utilizing cold storage, among other measures, organizations can significantly reduce their environmental impact.

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Our DAM system offers comprehensive solutions to support these efforts—Book a demo today to see how Wedia can help.

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