Since recently, a small badge appears at the bottom of every page of this site: green hosting. It is a detail most visitors will never notice. Still, we are happy to explain it, because it says something about how we look at our own footprint.
On this page7
A website does not live in the cloud
We talk about “the cloud” as if a website floats somewhere in the air. It does not. This page sits on a computer in a data centre that is on day and night, uses electricity and has to be cooled. Every time you open a page, something runs there.
Added together, all the data centres in the world use about 415 terawatt hours of electricity a year — around one and a half percent of all electricity consumption on earth. The International Energy Agency expects this to roughly double by 2030, mainly because of artificial intelligence. One and a half percent sounds modest, but it is more than the entire electricity consumption of the Netherlands.
What “green hosting” does and does not mean
Green hosting means that the company managing our server demonstrably uses electricity from renewable sources — or demonstrably offsets it. The Green Web Foundation, a Dutch foundation, keeps a public list of this and asks providers for evidence. Anyone who wants to can run our site through their check; the link is in the badge at the bottom of the page.
What it does not mean: that this website uses no energy, or that we as a practice are climate neutral. We could not back that up, so we do not claim it. It means that the electricity this site uses comes from a cleaner source than average — and that we choose a provider that has this checked rather than just claiming it.
Where this website is hosted
This website is hosted by Strato, a Berlin hosting company that is part of the IONOS Group. According to Strato, its data centres in Berlin and Karlsruhe have run on one hundred percent green electricity since 2008, making it one of the first hosting companies to do so. Since 2019 its energy management has been certified to ISO 50001, an international standard for energy management.
You do not have to take our word for it. Traffic to this site runs through an IONOS server address, and the Green Web Foundation has registered that address as green, with the IONOS Group sustainability report as evidence.
Why a chiropractic practice cares about this
Our profession is about the body in motion, and a body moves in an environment. Clean air, a liveable climate and a street where you can walk and cycle are not a green side issue: they are the conditions under which people stay healthy. It is no coincidence that the World Health Organization calls climate change a fundamental threat to health.
We cannot solve that problem with a website. But we think it would be odd to encourage patients to move more and leave the car at home more often, while not looking at our own choices. This is one of them. And if you come by public transport: under our locations there is a link to the journey planner for each practice.
A light site is also an efficient site
Green electricity is half the story. The other half is: how much work does a page actually take? This site is built around that. No heavy third-party tracking scripts, no advertising networks, no video that starts loading by itself, images no larger than they are shown on your screen, and fonts served from our own server.
We measured it. On a phone our homepage loads 550 kilobytes, almost two thirds of which are images. A typical homepage on a phone was 2,362 kilobytes in July 2025: the median from the annual measurement by the HTTP Archive. That is more than four times as much.
That is not only more efficient. It is also the reason this site opens quickly on an older phone with a weak connection — in the waiting room, for example. What is good for the environment and what is good for the visitor point in the same direction here.
Check for yourself
A badge is easily stuck on. That is why ours links to the check itself, not to an image of our own. You can also run your own website, or your employer’s, through it there. Not running on green power? With most hosting companies that is a matter of asking — and sometimes of switching.
Sources
- International Energy Agency (IEA), Energy and AI (2025): data centres used about 415 TWh in 2024, around 1.5% of global electricity consumption, with an expected doubling to about 945 TWh by 2030.
- STRATO, Nachhaltigkeit: green electricity since 2008 in the data centres in Berlin and Karlsruhe, energy management to ISO 50001 since 2019.
- Green Web Foundation, Green Web Check of chiropractor.nl: hosted by IONOS, green, with the IONOS Group Sustainability Report 2025 as evidence.
- HTTP Archive, Web Almanac 2025: Page Weight: a median mobile homepage was 2,362 kB in July 2025.
- World Health Organization (WHO), Climate change and health (fact sheet, 12 October 2023).
- Own measurement, 1 October 2026: the homepage of chiropractor.nl, loaded at phone size, 550 kB.
