Overview
Ecommerce shopper marketing agency Altavia.HRG wanted to position themselves as industry leaders for sustainability, achieve their green certification, and leverage these eco-practices to win more clients. Migrating to Nimbus allowed them to drop their own CO2 emissions, and supported them in achieving EcoVadis certification.
Like many agencies responsible for hosting large eCommerce clients, Altavia.HRG were unknowingly responsible for a large carbon output; each page visit to each site was generating CO2 – with busy, image-heavy eCommerce store pages responsible for even more than most.
By migrating those sites to Nimbus servers, the agency was able to ensure that they were hosted on servers run on 100% renewable energy, which drastically reduced their overall CO2 output. But the green credentials were only part of the story, as Altavia.HRG still needed hosting that was powerful enough to handle traffic spikes – which is exactly what the Nimbus servers gave them. Our hosting is green, and still 400% more capable than the competition during traffic spikes – so Atavia.HRG didn’t have to sacrifice performance for eco-credentials. In fact, both improved.
Challenge
The team wanted to position Altavia.HRG as an industry leader in terms of sustainable web design, to be able to use this to win clients and to hold themselves accountable for the environmental impact of their work.
We really want to put in the groundwork now and be at the forefront – no one is really thinking about how bad the impact is – so we definitely want to make sure to set a really solid foundation as we start to promote this more.
However, with their previous provider, 4.34g of CO2 was produced every time someone visited their homepage – a carbon impact Natalie describes as ‘atrocious’.
Solution
1 Achieving Silver EcoVadis certification.
EcoVadis scores are designed to give organisations insight into the corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance of their suppliers. CSR performance is assessed via a standardised platform and set of rankings, with suppliers being judged on four pillars, of which ‘Environment’ and ‘Sustainable Procurement’ are two.
“Sustainability is definitely something that’s always been on our agenda and it’s just becoming a bigger part of who we are”
This certification is proof of that effort; in order to achieve this certification, businesses must meet criteria to prove they are working in ways that mitigate the environmental impact of their business practices.
One change Altavia HRG made? Switching to a green hosting partner. If you’re running a lot of websites, a green hosting provider can make a significant change to your business’ carbon footprint.
2 Migrating to a green hosting provider.
Nimbus is carbon neutral, and our servers are run on 100% renewable energy, from a data centre that saves 45 million tonnes of CO2 every year.
This is a benefit we can pass along to our customers – and one that Natalie says was hugely important in their green strategy.
“We definitely are becoming more mindful of our impact and responsibility. We want to work on doing everything we can.”
Making sure your sites are hosted with an eco-friendly provider is the easiest way to begin reducing your business’ carbon footprint – and, as sustainability climbs clients’ agendas, it’s a benefit you can shout about during your proposals, too.
3 Optimising website design.
The average website generates 2,112kg of CO2 per year.
To put that into context – in the same amount of time, the average tree only absorbs 167kg of CO2. So it would take 12.6 trees to offset the carbon footprint of any given average website. After seeing the environmental impact of their own website, Altavia HRG made moves to introduce more eco-friendly practices.
“We are holding ourselves accountable to how much CO2 we emit per page. I’m actually proposing to the MD that if we go over this set amount we would be offsetting it in some way. We are trying to do things internally to hold ourselves accountable and benchmark ourselves to make sure that we are doing the right thing. And over time it’s something we can start to advertise as it naturally starts to climb up our clients’ agendas as well.”
You can learn more about sustainable web design in our guide.
Results
The impact of migrating to Nimbus was immediately obvious.
Natalie explains that while hosting with their previous provider, the homepage had been generating 4.34g of CO2 per page view – a figure which dropped to 0.35g as soon as they moved to the Nimbus platform.
By hosting their clients on Nimbus servers, Altavia.HRG are able to pass this benefit on to their end-clients, and educate them around the environmental impact of the internet.
We mention how we partner with Nimbus to provide green hosting, and say that if you work with us and give us your sites we can help to reduce your carbon footprint because you are hosted in a green environment. We share that we know what we are doing when it comes to eco-friendly actions and that we are doing all we can to reduce the CO2 emissions created from websites.
As a member of the Green Web Foundation, Nimbus can support our partners as they strive towards green credentials – as hosting with us means, among other things, your servers will be located in a 100% renewable energy data centre.
Summary
Moving to Nimbus had an immediate effect on the CO2 emissions of Altavia.HRG, supporting them in their goal to become industry thought leaders, win more clients, and achieve green certification.
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