10 Best Green and Eco-Friendly Hosting Providers in 2024

I like to consider myself somewhat of an eco-conscious individual. I recycle paper and plastics, maintain a compost pile for unused food scraps, and choose biodegradable products over single-use plastics.

But there’s one thing I’ve never really thought about: my digital footprint. I’m not talking about the trail of personal data I leave online. I’m referring instead to the environmental impact — including energy consumption, carbon emissions, resource extraction, and electronic waste — caused by using digital technologies.

Web hosting is no exception. In fact, it’s responsible for a staggering 10% of the world’s electricity consumption and contributes to 2% of CO2 emissions, a figure that’s shockingly on par with CO2 emissions by the airline industry! But the good news is there are ways to stay green in the world of web hosting.

We’ve scoured through dozens of web hosts and arrived at the 10 best green/eco-friendly hosting providers that have shown they’re committed to sustainability and renewable or natural energy sources.

GreenGeeks have made it on our lists before, and with good reason: It’s known for its affordable pricing, reseller program, and eco-friendly hosting and WordPress, WooCommerce, Reseller, or VPS hosting options, which range from around $3 to $40 per month.

These packages have fast, secure hosting, free backups, SSL certificates, and built-in caching. Plus, GreenGeeks plants a tree for each new hosting account.

GreenGeeks achieves its commitment to eco-friendliness by partnering with the Bonneville Environmental Foundation (BEF), a Green-e Partner. BEF calculates GreenGeeks’ energy usage and carbon footprint, then purchases 3x the necessary Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) to balance it out. These RECs are returned to the grid, ensuring GreenGeeks contributes as much clean energy as it consumes.

• Founded In: 2008
• Datacenters: Chicago; Montreal; Amsterdam; and Singapore
• Green Credentials: Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Green Power Partner and BEF Partner
• Website: https://www.greengeeks.com/

Green Web Host, a nonprofit company, specializes in eco-friendly web hosting, domain name registration, and server hosting. Green Web Host is a no-nonsense hosting provider that is best fit for experienced web developers who know what they’re looking for.

Its Los Angeles datacenter is powered by solar energy, making it California’s very first solar-powered hosting company.

They offer various hosting options, including carbon offset, solar-, hydro- and geothermal-powered shared web hosting, dedicated/hybrid servers, and VPS servers (with cooling features from Iceland!). VPS hosting prices vary from $17 to $64 per month, depending on your chosen plan.

More About Green Web Host

• Founded In: 2003
• Datacenters: Los Angeles; West Yorkshire, UK; and Reykjavík, IS
• Green Credentials: Partners with TreeSponsibility and plants a tree for every new broadband or web hosting customer. It also powers its offices with solar energy, sourcing additional electricity from Good Energy
• Website: https://www.greenwebhost.net/

HostPapa is another name we’re not unfamiliar with here at HostingAdvice. It constantly ranks for its customer support for small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) thanks to its easy-to-use web builder and fair prices.

HostPapa offers a variety of hosting options, including shared web hosting, optimized and managed WordPress hosting, VPS hosting, reseller hosting, and a unique PapaCare+ plan that takes care of all technical aspects of your website. (See what we mean about customer service?) Prices range from approximately $3 to $250 per month, depending on your chosen plan and hosting type.

What sets HostPapa apart is its commitment to using 100% certified green renewable energy resources for its datacenters, servers, and offices. It also purchases green energy tags from certified suppliers that calculate their total energy consumption and ensure a 100% equivalent amount of energy is added to the power grid.

More About HostPapa

• Founded In: 2006
• Datacenter Locations: Toronto and New York City
• Green Credentials: Bonneville Environmental Foundation (BEF) Partner and Green Tags-certified
• Website: https://www.hostpapa.com/

You may not have encountered Brownrice before, but if you’re in the southwestern United States and looking for a natural way to establish a web presence, it’s time to get acquainted.

It’s not Brownrice’s super-cool live cam that showcases different US locations with each page refresh that sets them apart; it’s the unwavering commitment to sustainability in all aspects of web hosting (starting at around $6/mo), server hosting ($60/mo), and webcam hosting services ($15/mo).

Brownrice exemplifies the “practice what you preach” mantra. Its datacenter, strategically perched at a high elevation of approximately 7,000 feet, uses the cool and dry outside air to cool its servers. Aiming to be entirely solar-powered within the next few years, around 50% of Brownrice’s datacenter and in-office energy comes from a 50kW solar array, which takes advantage of the 300 average sunny days of New Mexico.

More About Brownrice

• Founded In: 1997
• Datacenter Locations: New Mexico
• Green Credentials: Real-time solar-powered monitoring with a 50kW Solar Array for their eco-friendly datacenter, which also uses outside-air cooling systems
• Website: https://brownrice.com/

If you’re in Europe or have customers in the UK, Green Hosting is a great choice for your eco-web hosting needs. But Green Hosting is not limited to just this region; it’s also a perfect option for anyone looking to host a website, especially for nonprofits and charitable organizations.

Since its establishment in 2006, Green Hosting has experienced some impressive growth. Today, it operates 100% on renewable wind energy sourced from wind farms, all while guaranteeing a 99% uptime guarantee. It offers a variety of hosting plans, each aptly named after different types of wind, Breeze, Kaver, and Zephyr. The plans are priced between $8 to $15 per month, with unlimited email addresses, subdomains, and MySQL databases.

Green Hosting is committed to partnering with several organizations and nonprofits, including Ethical Hour, The Green Web Foundation, and Ethical Influencers. The Green Hosting team also gathers insights for more sustainable marketing and decision-making from organizations like Ethical Consumer and The Ethical Move.

More About Green Hosting

• Founded In: 2006
• Datacenter Locations: London
• Green Credentials: Partners with Ethical Hour Community, The Green Web Foundation, and Ethical Influencers
• Website: https://www.green-hosting.co.uk/

Web Neutral Project offers solar-powered hosting and carbon-neutral website auditing and certification. For between just $10 and $25 per month, you get 100% on-site, solar-powered hosting solutions with setup, free site migration, and varying disk space, data, MySQL, and website options.

Plus, you get hourly backups, a 30-day money-back guarantee, 99% service uptime, DDoS protection, and more — all run by solar power. Even get a nifty “Solar Powered Website” badge for your website so your customers know where your values lie.

Web Neutral Project’s core mission revolves around creating a carbon-neutral internet without compromising reliability. Aside from its web auditing and hosting services, Web Neutral Project also focuses on creating solutions for problems surrounding digital sustainability, e-recycling, decentralization, and data poverty.

More About Web Neutral Project

• Founded In: 2015
• Datacenter Locations: California and another location in the UK
• Green Credentials: Has offset 7,003,323 pounds of carbon emissions to date and is an EPA Green Power Partner and United Nations Global Compact partner
• Website: https://www.webneutralproject.com/

You might not have heard of XMission, but its existence is purpose-driven. XMission is powered by UTOPIA Fiber, an internet company in Utah whose goal is to bring fiber into as many homes and businesses across the Beehive State as possible.

But XMission takes it a step further: It offers shared hosting and managed or unmanaged cloud hosting for businesses and residents for rates that range from $15 to $100 per month in the lower 48 states and is powered by 100% renewable energy and resources. Its shared hosting plans offer between 20 GB and 100 GB of disk space — among the highest storage options we usually see, especially for basic plans.

XMission buys 2,000 RECs from ACT Commodities every year, which equals 2 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) of renewable energy. To put this environmental impact into perspective, it’s the same as planting nearly 24,000 tree seedlings for a decade, removing more than 300 cars from the road, and abstaining from using almost 3,300 barrels of oil.

More About XMission

• Founded In: 1993
• Datacenter Locations: Salt Lake City
• Green Credentials: Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ENERGY STAR certification and Rocky Mountain Power’s Blue Sky program
• Website: https://xmission.com/

As its name suggests, Eco Web Hosting is a perfect medley of eco-sustainability and web hosting services. It offers traditional shared web hosting, managed WordPress hosting, and reseller hosting for those who want to participate in being 100% powered by renewable energy.

Here’s where the instant eco impact comes in: Eco Web Hosting provides three hosting plans ranging from $4.25 to $14.59 per month. The Essential plan plants one tree for every purchase, the Professional plan plants two trees, and the Ultimate plan plants four trees with each purchase.

Its “green creds” are also impressive: As of 2023, Eco Web Hosting has planted nearly 200,000 trees across the US, UK, Africa, Australia, and South America, with an impressive 6,000 trees planted in a single month alone. They have also offset more than 8,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions and completed 60 gold standard projects.

More About Eco Web Hosting

• Founded In: 1999
• Datacenter Locations: Yorkshire, UK, plus 11 undisclosed locations in the UK
• Green Credentials: Partners with Eden Reforestation Projects, Ecologi, and Tree-Nation
• Website: https://www.ecowebhosting.co.uk/

We’ve talked about Wholegrain Digital before, and it’s because of its continued efforts that it’s on our list again today. While Wholegrain Digital operates through WordPress, it primarily focuses on providing genuinely sustainable web services.

So, if you’re looking for ways to make your website more sustainable and carbon-neutral, Wholegrain Digital is your one-stop shop because it puts its money where its mouth is. Its sustainability policy minimizes its carbon footprint by operating virtually, only using wood and paper from sustainable resources, and even opting for a no-fly approach among its employees. It does much more for the environment, which you can read more about here.

Its range of web services includes digital sustainability, digital strategy, UI/UX design, frontend development, WordPress CMS, and web performance, all with the mission of creating low-carbon websites. Wholegrain Digital’s websites produce 67% less pollution than the industry average.

More About Wholegrain Digital

• Founded In: 2007
• Datacenter Locations: London
• Green Credentials: Works with Unicef, Article 19, IFEX, Oxfam, One Ocean Hub, and Better Business Act and has been endorsed by organizations such as 1% for the Planet, WebsiteCarbon, Sustainable Web Manifesto, and 1.5C
• Website: https://www.wholegraindigital.com/

When Freethought was founded in 2003, it had a clear mission: to offer reliable web hosting at fair prices.

Freethought offers a variety of web hosting options, ranging from $4 to $15 per month for shared hosting. Each plan has ample disk space, email accounts, free migration services, and decent memory. All its plans are 100% carbon neutral, which is impressive considering the average website generates 4.61 grams of CO2 per page view. Additionally, for every plan you purchase, Freethought pledges to plant between one and five trees through their partner, Ecologi.

Over the years, Freethought has transformed into an environmentally conscious hosting provider with a strong ethical and environmental commitment, supported by concrete evidence from an ethical consumer report. Its current objective goes beyond merely reducing carbon emissions; it aims to reverse these emissions to pre-industrial levels.

More About Freethought

• Founded In: 2003
• Datacenter Locations: London and Manchester, UK
• Green Credentials: Fair Tax Mark certificated provider and partners with Ecologi and Climate Action Workforce
• Website: https://www.freethought.uk/

These hosting companies with green initiatives show that choosing eco-friendly hosting isn’t just a trend — it’s essential for a greener digital world. So the next time you’re looking for a hosting provider, remember that you can help create a more environmentally responsible future with a single choice.