Chapter Three, Three Years Later

When I sat down to read Chapter 3 again, I felt something I had not felt in the previous two reflections. I felt a small, quiet discomfort. Not because the chapter is bad, and not because the spine of what I argued is wrong, but because in this particular chapter I made specific recommendations by name, and three years on I would not feel comfortable making those same recommendations the same way. The chapter is about green web hosting, and at the time I wrote it, I did what most authors in this space do, which is gather the information that was publicly available, do my best to interpret it, and present the readers with a list of options I thought were trustworthy. I stand by the intent. I do not stand by the certainty.

This article is, more than anything, about what it feels like to look back at your own published advice and realise you would give it differently today. I want to walk through that honestly, and I want to use it as the entry point into a deeper conversation about how I have learned to think about hosting since 2023.

In Chapter 3 I included a list of hosting companies that came up when I searched for green web hosting on Google, and I expanded on a few of them with specific reasoning about why they appeared to be doing the right things. I am not going to repeat the names here, partly because the article is not really about the individual companies, and partly because I do not want to draw a new spotlight onto a list I no longer fully stand behind.

What I want to say plainly is this. At the time I wrote the chapter, the information I could find about those companies pointed in the direction that they were running on renewable energy, and I took that information at face value. Since then, I have spent three more years looking at this industry, talking to data centers directly, and reading the fine print of how renewable energy claims actually work. And what I have learned has made me less confident in the surface-level claims that any hosting company makes on its marketing page.

Here is the part that took me a while to fully internalise. A hosting company can write that they run on renewable energy, and that statement can be technically true while the servers themselves are drawing power from a grid that is mostly gray. The way this usually works is that the company purchases renewable energy certificates equivalent to the energy their servers consume. The certificates are real. The renewable energy generation they correspond to is real. But the electrons flowing into the data center are still coming from whatever the local grid happens to be producing at that moment, and in many countries, that is still a mix dominated by fossil fuels. The marketing claim and the physical reality are not the same thing, and I did not draw that distinction sharply enough in 2023.

I am not saying any specific company on my original list is being dishonest. I am saying that the question of whether a host is genuinely green is a much harder question than I treated it as in the chapter, and that I would not feel right giving readers the same list today without having done a much deeper level of investigation than the chapter shows.

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