Human activities cause environmental degradation, including burning fossil fuels for energy production and deforestation for agriculture expansion and wood extraction. These activities impact our and our children’s lives; therefore, it’s everyone’s responsibility to take care of the environment.
According to Ember (2024); Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy (2024), around 60% of global electricity was generated from burning fossil fuels in 2023. Burning fossil fuels releases greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, which are harmful for the environment.
The web hosting industry uses electricity to run its data centers, and thereby, when you visit a webpage, it emits 0.8 grams of carbon dioxide. The solution to this is green web hosting services. Navigate to this link to learn about what green web hosting is and how it works.
Green web hosting providers reduce the environmental impact of their data centers and operations. Therefore, it’s recommended for web hosting companies to power their data centers with renewable energy to be green and webmasters should choose green hosting services.
Now as that you have decided to host your website on or to switch to a green hosting company, but do you know what the best green web hosting companies are? Which one is right for you? This requires a bit of research, and we’ve done this homework for you.
We tested dozens of green web hosting companies and finally found out the seven best green web hosting companies that met our criteria.
Table of Contents
Our Criteria For Selecting The Best Green Web Hosting Companies
Each green web hosting company we were testing went through the criteria we set, which included:
- Green Initiatives: We have thoroughly checked to see what each green web hosting company does to protect the environment. We’ll share all the strategies that a green web host uses, such as using renewable energy sources, purchasing Renewable Energy Certificates, planting trees, recycling, and more. The more a company does to protect the environment, the more will be better.
- Performance: We have hosted the same website on all green web hosts, checked its speed from Canada, UK, India, USA, and Australia, and analyzed the uptime records. The LCP of hosted websites should be within 2500 ms to meet the Core Web Vitals metrics threshold of Good and the uptime guarantee should be at least 99.9%.
- Security: Each green web hosting company must provide essential security features such as free SSL certificates, automated backup, DDoS protection, brute force protection, and many more.
- Ease of Use: Their UI should be intuitive, simple to use, and easy to navigate.
- Customer Support: They must provide 24/7 good customer support through live chat, ticketing system, or phone.
- Reasonable Pricing: Their green hosting services must be worth the price.
After following the criteria we set, we only found seven out of all the green web hosting companies we were testing.
Top 7 Best Green Web Hosting Companies
If you’re short on time, then here’s the summary table.
| Green Host | Starting Price | Avg. Speed | Uptime Guarantee |
|---|---|---|---|
| GreenGeeks | $2.95/Mo | 1.28 Sec | 99.9% |
| Hostinger | $2.99/Mo | 1.96 Sec | 99.9% |
| DreamHost | $2.59/Mo | 1.03 Sec | 100% |
| InMotion Hosting | $2.29/Mo | 960 ms | 99.99% |
| HostPapa | $2.95/Mo | 1.68 Sec | 99.9% |
| A2 Hosting | $1.95/Mo | 1.88 Sec | 99.9% |
| Kinsta | $35/Mo | 982 ms | 99.9% |
Quick Note: Their ranking is based on green initiatives, pricing, data center locations, speed, uptime, security features, customer support, ease of use, and other features such as a free domain, email accounts, etc.
Now let’s explore each one in detail.
#1. GreenGeeks
GreenGeeks was founded in 2008 with a commitment to be the most eco-friendly green web hosting company in the world. Now it has become the leading green hosting company; it does more than any green hosting company to protect the environment. Hence, it has become the first choice of over 55,000 environmentally conscious individuals and businesses.
GreenGeeks offers shared hosting, VPS hosting, and reseller hosting. Their data centers are located in US, Canada, Netherlands, and Singapore.
Green Initiatives
GreenGeeks works with the Bonneville Environmental Foundation (BEF) to calculate its yearly energy consumption and carbon footprint. GreenGeeks then purchases RECs (Renewable Energy Certificates) to put back the energy into the grid three times higher than its annual energy consumption.
Additionally, they have an agreement with the One Tree Planted organization to plant a tree for every customer who purchases their green hosting services.
GreenGeeks is also recognized by the United States Environmental Protection Agency for its commitment to being environmentally friendly.
Overall, GreenGeeks is more energy-efficient and tries to have no waste of resources.
Performance
GreenGeeks not only takes care of the environment but also does a lot to maximize your website’s performance. It comes with several performance features, such as SSD storage, free CDN, advanced caching, LiteSpeed Web Server, and many more, to deliver the fastest possible speed.
We tested the speed of our website hosted on GreenGeeks through GTmetrix and got an average of 1.28 LCP, which is quite good. You can view here all the speed tests we ran.
| Locations | Canada | UK | India | USA | Australia | Average |
| LCP | 476 ms | 962 ms | 2.6 Sec | 1.3 Sec | 1.1 Sec | 1.28 Sec |
GreenGeeks also ensures that their web servers will be up 99.9% of the time. They monitor and check your web servers every 10 seconds from multiple locations to ensure they are up and running.
Security
The GreenGeeks hosting services include basic and advanced security features, including SSL certificates, automatic updates (to WordPress, themes, and plugins), automatic backups, an enterprise-level firewall, two-factor authentication, and malware scanning and removal.
Ease of Use
GreenGeeks has an intuitive, straightforward, and clean management dashboard that doesn’t require any technical knowledge. The relevant functions are logically grouped, making it easier to find them quickly.
They also provide cPanel to easily perform complicated tasks such as creating and managing subdomains, FTP accounts, and databases.
Customer Support
GreenGeeks offers good customer support around the clock through live chat, tickets, and phone. Their representatives are knowledgeable and will solve your problem in little to no time.
Pricing
Their hosting plans are pretty affordable while offering more value. Their shared web hosting (Lite plan) starts at $2.95/month, which includes one website, 50GB storage, a free domain name, an SSL certificate, 50 email accounts, nightly backups, CDN, and much more.
#2. Hostinger
Founded in 2011, Hostinger is the most well-known web hosting provider in the industry. In 2020, it was the fastest-growing web hosting company, according to PCMag.
Hostinger was established with a mission to help people bring their ideas onto the web easily and now they have fairly achieved this as they serve more than one million creators from 150+ countries.
The web host offers shared web hosting, managed WordPress hosting, cloud hosting, VPS hosting, managed WooCommerce hosting, Minecraft server hosting, and more.
Their data centers are located in strategic locations such as France, Lithuania, the Netherlands, UK, India, Indonesia, Singapore, USA, and Brazil.
Green Initiatives
Their data centers in the USA (PHX), USA (Boston), Lithuania, UK, Brazil, and France are green, using renewable energy to operate.
Now let’s talk about how energy-efficient their data centers are.
Do you know what PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) is? It’s a metric expressed as a ratio that determines how efficiently a data center uses energy. It can be calculated by dividing the total amount of energy entering a data center by the energy used to run the IT equipment within it. The lower the PUE value, the more energy-efficient the data center is. The PUE value of 1.5 has been proposed as a benchmarking standard.
When it comes to Hostinger’s data centers, the PUE value was between 1.3 and 1.75, making an average of 1.54 in 2023, according to Hostinger’s Sustainability Report 2023.
Performance
On average, the largest content element on our test website took 1.96 seconds to load, which is still good. It’s worth mentioning that we didn’t use a content delivery network. Click on the link to view all the speed tests.
| Locations | Canada | UK | India | USA | Australia | Average |
| LCP | 814 ms | 1.4 Sec | 2.6 Sec | 2.2 Sec | 2.8 Sec | 1.96 Sec |
Hostinger offers you a 99.9% uptime guarantee to ensure your website will be up and running. If they fail to maintain this uptime guarantee, then they will add a credit of 5% of your monthly hosting fee to your account upon your request. This credit can be only used to purchase their products and services.
Security
Hostinger offers superior security to protect your website from hack attacks. Their shared hosting includes unlimited free SSL certificates, weekly/daily backups, vulnerability scanner, dedicated IP address, WordPress auto-updates, Web Application Firewall, DDoS protection, malware scanner, free domain WHOIS privacy protection, and many more.
Ease of Use
Hostinger provides you with its custom-built control panel, called hPanel. hPanel enables you to easily manage domains, emails, backups, files, databases, and everything. It also shows you how much storage and bandwidth you have consumed. Overall, Hostinger is beginner-friendly and easy to use.
Customer Support
Hostinger’s customer support team, known as the Customer Success team, is available 24/7 to help you whenever you want. You can contact them via live chat, tickets, and email, though there’s no phone support available. According to my experience, their customer support is excellent.
Moreover, an extensive knowledge base is available that will help you find the answers to your questions and solve your problems on your own.
Pricing
Do you know why Hostinger is so popular? It’s because of their low-priced web hosting packages that deliver more value for money.
Their Premium (entry-level) web hosting plan costs you only $2.99/month and includes 100 websites, 100GB NVMe storage, unlimited bandwidth, a free domain, free SSL certificates, 100 email accounts, weekly backups, free website migration, and so much more.
I think it’s really the best choice for beginners and small to medium-sized businesses who want to save a lot.
#3. DreamHost
DreamHost is the oldest yet most reliable web hosting company, established in 1997. Since then, they have hosted more than 1.5 million websites of 400,000+ customers.
Depending on your needs, you can go with their shared hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated hosting, or cloud hosting. You have the option to choose the server location, either Virginia (USA) or Oregon (USA).
DreamHost is the first green web host on our list that provides daily automated backups even on their basic shared hosting plan, which costs $2.59/month. You can read our full DreamHost review here.
Green Initiatives
DreamHost uses renewable energy power, high-efficiency cooling systems, and power-efficient processors to reduce their carbon footprint. They also promote remote work culture, paperless virtual workspace, and the extensive use of videoconferencing.
Performance
The same website we hosted on DreamHost and checked its speed from Canada, UK, India, USA, and Australia; the average LCP was 1.03 seconds. Navigate to this link to view all the speed tests.
| Locations | Canada | UK | India | USA | Australia | Average |
| LCP | 414 ms | 1.0 Sec | 1.9 Sec | 540 ms | 1.3 Sec | 1.03 Sec |
DreamHost comes with a 100% uptime guarantee. If they fail to keep your website up and running 100% of the time, then you’ll receive your one-day hosting cost as compensation for each hour of downtime. Keep in mind that any downtime previously announced as scheduled maintenance or caused by coding or configuration errors on the part of the customer is not included in this uptime guarantee.
Security
Unlike other web hosts that offer daily automatic backup only on top-tier plans, DreamHost includes it in every shared hosting plan. In addition, you get free SSL certificates, automatic WordPress updates, free domain privacy, Shell Access, and more.
Ease of Use
The DreamHost’s control panel is well-structured and intuitive; it’s the right fit for beginners. From the left sidebar, you can easily manage everything, whether it’s your websites, domains, emails, WordPress, or billing information.
Customer Support
You can contact their customer support through live chat and tickets. It will take an hour to receive the initial response via tickets and 60 seconds through live chat. If you’re a self-help person, then here’s an extensive knowledge base, covering the most technical topics that can help you fix the technical issues on your own.
Pricing
There are two shared hosting plans, namely Shared Starter and Shared Unlimited.
The Shared Starter plan costs you $2.59/month and gets you access to one website, one free domain, free SSL, and 50GB SSD storage. The Shared Unlimited plan is priced at $3.95/month and incorporates unlimited websites, unlimited SSD storage, one free domain, free SSL certificates, and unlimited email accounts.
It’s worth mentioning that the Shared Starter plan doesn’t include free email accounts; adding an email account will cost you an extra $1.67/month, which is something most web hosting providers offer for free.
The best thing about DreamHost is its 97-day money-back guarantee; so it’s completely risk-free.
#4. InMotion Hosting
Founded in 2001, InMotion Hosting is the first-ever green web hosting company to have a green data center in Los Angeles. In addition, their other data centers are located in Virginia and Amsterdam.
It serves shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated servers, reseller hosting, Minecraft server hosting, and more to over 170,000 customers around the globe.
The best thing about InMotion Hosting is that its Core shared hosting plan comes with two websites, 100GB NVMe storage, a free domain, and SSL certificates. This means you can easily launch two websites simultaneously on the basic plan without incurring extra costs.
Read More: InMotion Hosting Managed WordPress Hosting Review
Green Initiatives
As mentioned earlier, it’s the first-ever green web hosting company to have a green data center in Los Angeles that uses outside air cooling technology. This technology reduces the hosting company’s cooling cost by nearly 70 percent and lowers its carbon output by 2000 tons per year.
Besides, they have implemented green tactics in their offices, such as reducing resource waste and recycling hardware.
Performance
InMotion Hosting is also a fast green web hosting company. We took a backup of our test website and restored it on InMotion Hosting. We then performed the speed tests from several locations through GTmetrix and got an average LCP of 960 ms. Navigate to this link to view the speed tests.
| Locations | Canada | UK | India | USA | Australia | Average |
| LCP | 427 ms | 1.0 Sec | 1.8 Sec | 473 ms | 1.1 Sec | 960 ms |
InMotion Hosting offers a 99.99% uptime guarantee for shared hosting plans only. If your web server has a physical downtime that is not within the mentioned uptime, then they will add one month of credit to your account.
Security
Their shared hosting plans come with free SSL certificates, hack and malware protection, DDoS protection, SSH access, and more. Though free automatic backup is not included in any of the shared web hosting plans, it costs you alone $2.50 per month.
Ease of Use
InMotion Hosting is a user-friendly platform, providing a native account management panel (called AMP) and cPanel.
AMP is used to manage your billing, domains, account details, and so on. The AMP interface is similar to cPanel; you can even find here some cPanel modules such as email, SSL management, and Softaculous. If you have ever used cPanel, then it’s not going to be a problem for you.
About cPanel, we all know that it’s the industry standard control panel. Overall, both control panels are intuitive and user-friendly, making hosting management easier and enhancing your experience.
Customer Support
You can reach their customer support 24/7/365 through live chat, email, ticket support, and phone. However, the phone support is only available from Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. ET.
There’s also a community support forum where you can discuss your problems and get answers to your questions. However, if you want to solve your problem yourself, then here’s the vast knowledgebase that has more than 5000 articles, covering most common tasks, domains, product guides, email tutorials, website tutorials, and so many more.
Pricing
InMotion Hosting’s basic (Core) shared hosting plan costs $2.29 per month, which includes a free domain name registration, 2 websites, free SSL certificates, 100GB NVMe SSD storage, 10 email addresses, and marketing tools. So the services they provide offer good value for money.
Their shared hosting plans are backed by a 90-day money-back guarantee, the second-longest money-back guarantee in the industry.
#5. HostPapa
HostPapa is another green web hosting company that was founded in 2006 with a mission to offer fully featured web hosting services powered by renewable energy. The green hosting provider has grown to the next level, currently serving shared hosting, managed WordPress hosting, VPS, and reseller hosting to more than 500,000 SMBs.
The eco-friendly hosting company has servers in USA, Canada, and the Netherlands, which are up and running 99.9% of the time. Additionally, they take care of your website’s performance and security, as well as providing good customer support.
Read More: HostPapa Review
Green Initiatives
HostPapa purchases RECs from BEF that represent the equivalent amount of energy generated from solar or wind to what they have consumed annually and they then feed back that generated energy into the grid.
Performance
We hosted our websites on HostPapa and didn’t install the CDN or caching plugin. We checked the speed of our website from several locations; the average LCP was 1.68 seconds, which is fine. Tap this link to view the speed tests.
| Locations | Canada | UK | India | USA | Australia | Average |
| LCP | 963 ms | 1.5 Sec | 2.7 Sec | 850 ms | 2.4 Sec | 1.68 Sec |
HostPapa also ensures that our web servers will be up and running 99.9% of the time. We have checked its uptime record for the last 30 days; it was 99.977%.
Security
HostPapa offers free SSL certificates as well as automatic backups and the Protection Power suite. It’s worth mentioning that automatic backups and Protection Power are only available for top-tier plans.
Protection Power is an advanced security suite that includes WAF, Trust Seal, malware scan, vulnerability scan, blacklist check, brute force protection, and so much more.
Ease of Use
The UI of HostPapa’s user account management dashboard is user-friendly; even newbies would be able to easily navigate and perform tasks. Additionally, you get access to cPanel to manage and further customize the settings of your hosting account and website.
Customer Support
You can reach HostPapa’s customer support team (PapaSquad) day and night via live chat, support tickets, email, and phone.
Besides, there’s a huge knowledgebase, covering a wide range of categories, including cPanel, web hosting, and domain. In addition, if you are a top-tier plan subscriber, you can book a free 30-minute one-on-one dedicated video session with an expert.
Pricing
Like GreenGeeks, HostPapa’s Essentials web hosting plan starts at $2.95 per month, which includes 2 websites, 50GB NVMe SSD storage, an SSL certificate, and 10 email accounts. This plan doesn’t include free automatic backups, although you can create manual backups.
Overall, the services they offer are worth the price.
#6. A2 Hosting
A2 Hosting is another great sustainable hosting provider that was established in 2003. They started the hosting business with a mission to make it easier for people to bring their businesses to the web. Now they have fairly achieved it as they serve more than 110,000 customers across 223 countries.
A2 Hosting offers a variety of hosting services to cater to different needs, including shared web hosting, managed WordPress hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated hosting, reseller hosting, and cPanel hosting. The data center options include Michigan (USA), Arizona (USA), Amsterdam (Netherlands), and Singapore.
A2 Hosting is the most budget-friendly green web hosting company on our list, starting as low as $1.95/month while doing everything it can to protect the environment.
Green Initiatives
Since 2007, A2 Hosting has been partnered with Carbonfund.org, purchasing their carbon credits to offset carbon emissions as well as support their green projects such as reforestation and renewable energy development.
Besides, they reduce the use of paper, recycle their old hardware, and use outside air to cool their data centers. In addition, their employees are working remotely, preventing unnecessary carbon emissions from daily commutes to the office and saving on electricity and natural gas usage.
Performance
We measured the speed of our test website from Canada, UK, India, USA, and Australia via GTmetrix. On average, it took 1.88 seconds to load the largest content element on our website. It’s worth noting that if we would have installed a CDN, then it would have been even faster. Just click on this link to access the speed tests.
| Locations | Canada | UK | India | USA | Australia | Average |
| LCP | 1.9 Sec | 1.1 Sec | 2.4 Sec | 1.5 Sec | 2.5 Sec | 1.88 Sec |
A2 Hosting offers a 99.9% uptime commitment, making it a reliable green hosting provider. If they fail to deliver 99.9% uptime, then they will credit you 5% of the paid monthly fee for every hour of downtime caused by an internal network issue.
Security
Their shared hosting includes free SSL certificates, free automatic backups, DDoS protection, a web hosting firewall, brute force protection, virus scanning, server hardening, security monitoring, and much more.
Ease of Use
Their account management dashboard has been built with ease of use, making the management much easier.
The top bar menu enables you to manage your services, domains, billing, and support. The Home tab gives you a brief overview of your account as well as provides quick access to commonly used options, such as accessing cPanel. You can access cPanel with just a single click here.
Customer Support
Their support representatives are knowledgeable and available day and night through live chat, tickets, and phone. They are trained to solve your problem efficiently. Keep in mind that their technical support is a little bit slow.
You can also access their comprehensive knowledge base, covering every single category that matters to you. Overall, their customer support is good.
Pricing
A2 Hosting is the cheapest web hosting company on our list. Its Startup web hosting only costs $1.95 per month and supports one website, 100GB SSD storage, free site migration, free SSL, staging, and unlimited email accounts. So it’s really a pocket-friendly web hosting service.
#7. Kinsta
Kinsta was founded in 2013 with a mission to be the best web hosting provider in the world. More than 120,000 businesses and brands have hosted their websites, applications, and databases on Kinsta. It’s because they not only provide excellent customer support and user-friendly interface, but they have also built their hosting infrastructure on top of the Google Cloud platform, leading to unparalleled performance and security.
The hosting services they offer are fully managed WordPress hosting, web application hosting, managed database hosting, and static site hosting. When you want to host your WordPress website with them, they allow you to choose from 37 available Google Cloud data centers, located in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America.
Read More: Kinsta’s Managed WordPress Hosting Review
Green Initiatives
Their hosting infrastructure is powered by the Google Cloud Platform, which purchases renewable energy to match their 100% electricity consumption. Not only that, Google Cloud data centers consume an average of about 50% less energy compared to other options.
Additionally, Kinsta mentions it offers an advanced caching solution that optimizes your website’s data transfer, lowers your page size, and reduces the number of times users need to load your web page. This technique significantly reduces your website’s carbon footprint.
Besides, Kinsta’s team is working remotely, which means their employees don’t have to commute. They also don’t have massive headquarters with hundreds of offices that use a high amount of electricity.
Performance
When we were checking the speed of our Kinsta-hosted website, we got the best speed results around the globe; the average LCP was 982 ms. Tap the link to access the speed tests we performed.
| Locations | Canada | UK | India | USA | Australia | Average |
| LCP | 449 ms | 823 ms | 2.0 Sec | 638 ms | 1.0 Sec | 982 ms |
When you host your website on Kinsta, it guarantees that your website will be up and running 99.9% of the time in a month. If your website’s downtime exceeds 0.1% in a month equal to 43 minutes, then you’ll receive SLA credits upon your request. If you use managed WordPress hosting, then you’ll get 5% of your monthly subscription value for each complete 60 minutes of downtime.
Security
Kinsta takes your website’s security seriously; it provides the best security features to protect your website from attackers. All their managed WordPress hosting plans come with free SSL certificates, daily backups, malware removal, SSH access, enterprise-level firewall, DDoS protection, and hack-fix guarantee.
At the same time, you’ll benefit from an enhanced security model developed by GCP (Google Cloud Platform), as your website will be hosted on its servers.
Ease of Use
The Kinsta’s UI (User Interface) is modern-looking yet easy to use and navigate. It has been developed with non-tech-savvy users in mind.
The Kinsta’s Dashboard lets you easily manage your websites, applications, databases, and DNS from the left sidebar.
The main Dashboard section gives you a brief overview of your recent activities and notifications you have received. You can also add more services to your account from here, as well as access its guides, tutorials, and documentation.
Overall, Kinsta’s Dashboard is easy to use.
Customer Support
Kinsta provides 24/7/365 expert support via fast and easy-to-use live chat. Their support is available in five languages, such as English, Italian, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. Additionally, you can contact their sales department via phone and WhatsApp. They also have a community forum and a huge knowledge base.
Pricing
Their Starter managed WordPress hosting plan costs you $35 per month, which includes 1 WordPress website, 25000 unique monthly visits, 10GB storage, 100GB CDN, free migration, and 14-day backup retention.
It looks expensive, but actually it’s not because of its enhanced performance and superior security. It’s really the best option for those who want to host their website on Google Cloud’s servers to get lightning-fast speed.
Conclusion
It’s everyone’s responsibility to do their part to save our beautiful environment and lovely earth. As consumers, we can do this by using eco-friendly products, which are harmless to the environment. Hence, webmasters should host their websites on green web hosts to reduce the carbon footprints generated by their websites significantly.
We researched to find the best green hosting companies and finally identified the seven eco-friendly web hosts that take care of the environment and deliver better performance, security, and customer support. Our list of the best green hosting companies includes GreenGeeks, Hostinger, DreamHost, InMotion Hosting, HostPapa, A2 Hosting, and Kinsta.
