A few years ago, an essential requirement for a server was that its processor has the best performance. However, the priorities have changed thanks to the increasing environmental awareness and the impact of the energy crisis. Nowadays, one of the most decisive factors is how green or eco-friendly the server is and how low the energy consumption of the different components like the CPU, storage drive, or RAM is.
We all know that carbon footprint is the total amount of gases we release into the atmosphere. Still, we mostly hear about this topic regarding cars, and factories, not servers and software.
But indeed, server parks produce a lot of greenhouse gas. In 2020, GoClimet researched the carbon footprint of different kinds of servers. The results for non-cloud servers using non-green electricity were frightening, but the other numbers were not so promising either. Consequently, hosting providers needed to take action and make “greener” servers with lower carbon emissions.
First of all, by using renewable energy sources for electricity to run the servers.
As more and more companies become aware of the importance of sustainability, they are beginning to adopt green practices in their operations. For instance, Google has started using renewable energy to power its facilities and reuses water generated through reusability to cool off its servers. Meanwhile, Microsoft uses undersea water to cool its computers at the data centers. These are just two examples of how big companies are beginning to adopt sustainable practices. As more companies follow this, methods like this will likely become standard in the industry. This is a positive development, as it will help to reduce the environmental impact of the tech sector.
Secondly, by increasing the lifetime of servers, you can conserve resources that would otherwise be necessary to create new servers, causing a cutback in waste and pollution associated with manufacturing and disposing of servers. In addition, longer-lived servers typically use less energy, also reducing environmental impact.
Lastly, hosting providers can lower their carbon footprint with server protection, decreasing the load and improving efficiency by reducing the data that needs to be processed.
A couple of years ago, we wrote about how BitNinja might increase the load if it is not configured well, but since then, we have reached the complete opposite effect. After installing BitNinja, you can experience a significant decrease in load.
It is partially because BitNinja has the most extensive IP list that is promptly put on the blacklist or greylist, reducing the amount of data that needs to be processed and stored. Furthermore, the software stops the malicious traffic before it reaches the server, so it helps improve its efficiency, reducing the energy needed to run them. As a result, BitNinja can play a crucial role in decreasing the environmental load.
In addition, according to 1-grid, BitNinja has greatly reduced the time their internal team spent cleaning infected websites. Hence, they saved time and money that they can spend now on other aspects of their business, like getting more environment-friendly.
If you want to take small steps in becoming green, you can try BitNinja for free to see how it immediately reduces the load.
