Our new homepage – Sustainable in the internet

Hotel Villa Meererbusch. Now even more beautiful in the web.

Done! The redesign of our homepage is now online. A year ago, we completely redesigned our website, but there is always something to do. Higher, faster, further, more beautiful. Our friend and Internet guru Andreas, whom we admire very much and to whom we owe in principle everything (“Yes, Andreas. You have always said that, and now, we see it. You were absolutely right!”), accompanied us on our path to the light, so to speak. We owe him not only a really appealing Internet presence, but also highly reasonable discussions in terms of web hosting. How, and with whom. Also from an energy and climate point of view. And that means concretely for us:

– Our electricity comes from 100% renewable energy sources. Because it starts with your own power socket.

– The host for our website and the cloud services, that we use, run with green electricity from 100% renewable energies.

Why is this important? Because the Internet „eats” energy.

The Internet „eats” energy. And this really large scale.

What do climate and energy consumption have to do with our homepage? In fact, quite a lot. Because the Internet really needs a lot of energy, and not just when people are digging for bitcoins to give you a spectacular example. The Dutch economist Alex de Vries recently calculated that the production of a single Bitcoin requires as much energy as an average family consumes in 12 years. But even if you and we don’t dig here at all, most of us are at least highly engaged Internet users.

In the morning we quickly look through our new e-mails, and at least fly over the headlines to the current news. So much has happened in the world again. And we are there in “real time”. Presumably this seems familiar to you. More than half of the entire world population, about 3.7 billion people worldwide, to be exact, naturally use the Internet. And a good 37% of Internet users are socially networked.

Many of us are always online via smartphone and tablet. No matter when, no matter where. WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest. Online shopping, online banking – simple, fast, at a mouse click. Music streaming or this new series at Netflix. What’s new on Youtube or Vimeo? And then there’s the “Internet of Things”, where more and more devices are connected to each other.

Really a lot of computing

All the data centers with thousands of servers on which the data is stored make the Internet possible in the first place. And these data centers work around the clock. 24 hours a day. Always. And a relatively new trend, cloud computing, is further increasing the demand for global data centers. In cloud computing, data is no longer stored on the user’s own computer or smartphone, but on global servers. And that really needs a lot of power. If the Internet were a country, it would have the sixth largest electricity consumption in the world. A study by Greenpeace comes to this heavyweight figure. And the trend is rising.

The industry, i.e. IT companies and operators of data centers, are already doing intensive research and development when it comes to keeping the rising energy consumption under control. This is because it is usually by far the largest operating post in a data center. This involves, for example, clever cooling systems for the servers or more efficient load control. If there is comparatively little traffic, the servers can sometimes be in stand-by mode.

The ZDF documentation “Stromfresser Internet“ (“Energy-eater internet“) from their “planet e” series, for example, offers a very informative summary of the current state of affairs.

In short, the big rudder is already being pulled, but what can we all contribute? We? Yes, we can. Because in this game, too, each individual can make his or her own contribution. By making your choice. For example for your energy supplier. Your web host or your cloud provider. And what else? Maybe get offline from time to time. Classically analog. Unusual feeling? Maybe. Try it out!