Green cloud storage comparison

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Sustainability through cloud hosting with green electricity — what’s behind it?

Since 2015 at the latest there has been a growing trend towards sustainability in the IT industry: more and more providers offer dedicated or virtual servers and Cloud hosting powered by green electricity. They assure their customers that each data centre uses renewable energy for its power supply. This approach contributes significantly to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, because the energy demand for hardware and cooling is high and the need for high‑performance IT infrastructure continues to grow. Technologies such as the mobile communications standard 5G and a continuous increase in the bandwidth of network connections mean this development is accelerating further.

What does cloud hosting with green electricity actually mean?

When a provider uses the label server or Cloud hosting with green electricity, this does not necessarily mean that the power supply uses exclusively renewable energy — this is technically impossible in the same way as for households, because conventional power stations using fossil fuels must be deployed as a balancing source to ensure a constant output. In addition, a data centre — with extremely rare exceptions such as some facilities using hydroelectric power in Norway or geothermal generators in the USA — does not have its own autonomous power supply, but draws its consumption from industrial grids and from national energy exchanges.

Furthermore, a customer should consider that there is a substantial difference between a web host offering servers and Cloud hosting with green electricity and one that guarantees a data centre uses only renewable energy. The wording "with" typically denotes a certain and often variable share, which is not governed by law and is only specified exactly in contracts in exceptional cases. Sustainability is not guaranteed in this case if the company in question neither provides clear information about its energy mix nor publishes a binding timetable.

How does cloud hosting with green electricity affect sustainability?

Many users underestimate the high energy consumption caused by the internet and modern information and communication technology. In particular, streaming high-resolution video proves, on closer inspection, to be resource-intensive because very large amounts of data must be transmitted. The estimated average consumption is about one kilowatt for just ten minutes of film, with the end-user devices used such as smart TVs, phones or computers not yet included. The main contributors are:

• Search engine queries, which on Google alone amount to several billion per day
• Video conferences with many participants
• Streaming high-resolution videos via platforms such as YouTube, Netflix or Amazon Prime
• Artificial intelligence (AI) driven by powerful co-processors such as graphics cards
• Computationally intensive scripts for interactive rendering of web pages with high visitor numbers
• Cloud-based applications delivered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
• Game streaming such as Nvidia GeForce Cloud Gaming

Even more efficient and faster protocols such as HTTP/2 do not offer a solution to these challenges, but merely serve as a tool. Cloud hosting powered by renewable energy contributes significantly to enabling sustainability for these kinds of applications. Although traditional virtual servers (VPS) and dedicated servers are less significant compared with these highly power‑intensive processes in terms of their performance, they still account for a significant share due to their large numbers. Regardless of their use, any data centre that uses only renewable energy for its power supply therefore represents progress towards greater sustainability. In the medium to long term, switching to virtual servers and dedicated servers as well as cloud hosting powered by renewable energy is indispensable to meet the continuously growing demand for computing power using renewable energy.

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