Measure your website’s footprint and offset it too

September 4th, 2008 Alex

As more startups and websites come out everyday, the computer and IT technology carbon footprint is increasing. With Co2Stats, you can monitor and manage your website’s environmental footprint. Co2Stats even purchases renewable energy to offset the carbon footprint. Co2Stats measures the carbon footrpint that is created from your website from “dozens of signals and trusted data from international agencies”, whatever that means. The company was founded by academics from Harvard and Yale, so I am sure they were smart enough to come up with some way of measuring it.

The Y Combinator backed company has also had plenty of press coverage from websites, newspapers and television and has signed up over 2,500 sites in over 25 countries. You can sign up for a basic plan for free which is only good for up to 100 page views per month. Unfortunately that isnt very much. The Basic plan, for $9.95/month is still a decent deal with up to 100,000 page views/month.

Here is the methodology used to explain the process taken from their website:

1. We distinguish between mobile and desktop/laptop client CPUs rendering a website. For example, an iPhone viewing a website will consume significantly less overall power than a desktop PC.
2. For PCs, the client-side display is assumed to dominate the impact of the online experience after the page loads.
3. Within the display, footprint ownership is modeled by the relative screen area of the site.
4. We measure the geographic locations of all client computers connecting to a website. This signal is crucial, since power sources (and their consequent carbon emission rates) vary dramatically from region to region, even within nations.
5. In addition to server and client-side contributions, bandwidth plays an important role. For a representative sample of transactions, we measure the overall page size and calculate the corresponding network footprint. Geographical influences are an important factor in this parameter as well.
6. The geographic locations of a representative set of servers backing the site are measured.
7. The server-side CPU impact model is based on transaction

Entry Filed under: Green Tech,Tech Industry