Greenhost Blog

100% Green energy and still CO₂ emissions?

2025-07-22T08:00:00+00:00

Our servers consume a lot of electricity. For this we of course use 100% green energy. We don't buy this electricity directly, but this energy is supplied by our data centres. We do validate their energy sources, as well as request Green certificates/GvOs from them. This should mean we do not emit CO₂, right?

Well, even though we are using 'green' energy, the energy coming out of the wall socket is always a mix of green and grey energy. It only becomes 100% green through certificates (GvOs). We wrote a lengthy article about this: sjoemel stroom. So even if on paper it’s green, that doesn't mean it is actually green.

We believe that even if our emissions from electricity are zero on paper, we should do our best to make them zero in real life as well. To that end, we calculate our yearly (combined) real CO₂ emissions, and based on those calculations, we compensate through Trees for All. We also invest an equal amount into the energy transition through Meewind. Under the current circumstances, we believe this is the best we can do.

Understanding how Green the Grid is

The grid is a mix of wind, solar, gas, coal, nuclear, and other energy sources. If there is more wind or sunshine on a given day, the usage of gas and/or coal goes down, making the grid greener. At night, energy usage is lower, but there is also no solar energy. So depending on wind speed, the grid can be clean or dirty. This fluctuates throughout the day.

Luckily nowadays, there is much more precise information available on how green the grid is. European grid managers are required to make this data available and the website Electricity Maps sifons this information in a great visualisation. This is expressed in the term gCO₂eq/kWh — in other words, the number of grams of CO₂ equivalent emitted per kilowatt-hour used.

This is valuable information, as we can use this to improve our calculations.

How can we use this (grid) data?

Recently we added this grid data to our calculations. This allows us to create a better understanding of the impact our operations have. To see this in action, we'll explain how much electricity is used and how we combine this with the grid data.

Energy usage (per rack)

Servers are installed in a server rack. We operate multiple racks, usually each has a maximum capacity of ~5.5–6 kW. The below graph shows the energy consumption of a single rack, over a period of 48 hours.

Energy Consumption per Rack

As seen in the graph, during nighttime the platform is less busy and we consume less energy. However, the baseline for one rack is still about 5.35 kW, while the peak is at 5.90 kW (about 10% above baseline; note the Y-axis does not start at 0). So although there is variation, it is somewhat limited. We are experimenting with adjusting power settings of servers to improve energy savings. This can improve the saving a bit, but that effect will be limited as well.

The power grid

Now we add information about the grid. In this second graph, you see how efficient/green the grid is at specific times. For example, at nighttime on the 29th, the grid was not very clean with a value of 375 gCO₂eq/kWh, compared to daytime, when it was ~100 gCO₂eq/kWh. Of course, at night there is no production from solar panels. Apparently, during that night, wind speeds were also low, resulting in the need for more gas/unclean production of energy.

Power Grid Emissions

Combine both data.

In the final graph, we calculate how much CO₂ was emitted over this 48 hour period. (Note, this graph shows the cumulative CO₂ emissions. This means the line can only go up.) Now we see that when our electricity usage becomes lower during the night (see the first graph), our emissions actually started increasing at a higher rate.

Combined emissions

This makes sense, as we saw in the second graph, the grid power was less clean that night.

Conclusion

With this information combined, we have a much clearer picture of how much CO₂ we really emit. This helps us with our strategies to be more sustainable and decide where we should focus our efforts to make changes.

For the last years, we have used the average yearly data. Now we have the real-time data in hand, it is possible for us to revalidate our earlier estimations.

We are working on how to apply this information to improve our sustainability goals. For example by combining this data with the CO2-emissions during hardware manufacturing, this will have an effect on some policies. We will share more information about this in the near future.

Greenhost Is Leaving X and Facebook

2025-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

For many, many years, we have been ambivalent regarding our presence on social media in general, and Facebook and X/Twitter in particular.

Already back in 2010, we wrote a (Dutch) blogpost on whether or not to quit Facebook, and in 2015 we joined a large global initiative asking Mark Zuckerberg to stop his internet.org scheme. Since then, things only got worse.

Although social media are undeniably a very powerful tool in community building, we now feel the abuse of power and the tone of voice on X/Twitter, and the endless list of privacy concerns with Facebook far outweigh any benefits, and the ethical divide between those platforms and us has become too large.

Therefore, as of today, we will stop any active interaction on and through X/Twitter and Facebook.

This does not mean we fully turn our backs on social media. In the future, we might join other, more aligned, Social Media platforms such as Mastodon, Bluesky or Diaspora, but we have not yet decided on this.

In the meantime we will post our updates through the blogpages on our website. You can also use our RSS feed to follow us. If we indeed decide to join another social media platform, we will also share this here.

Updates on system status and maintenance can, as usual, be found on https://status.greenhost.net.

PS: Metas decision to stop working with independent fact-checkers was published after our decision to leave the platform, but only strengthens our resolve that we no longer belong there.

Greenhost Joins Forces with The Sharing Group (TSG)

2024-12-11T00:00:00+00:00

For over 20 years, Greenhost has focused on what we believe truly matters: sustainability, digital civil rights, and security. These ideals are at the core of what we do, and we’ve pursued these ideals with great passion and conviction— and we remain as committed to them today as we were when we started.

To continue pushing our ideals and amplifying our impact, we have recently become part of The Sharing Group (TSG).

Greenhost’s small scale and independent position are a key reason for some of our customers to host with us. That’s why we’d like to explain the new partnership, why we made this decision, and what it means for the future.

Why this decision?

In recent years, the hosting industry has evolved significantly. Hosting has become increasingly complex, with ever-growing technical challenges, more advanced security threats, stricter legal requirements, and rising customer expectations. Our small scale made it harder for us to navigate these changes while staying true to our ideals.

At the same time, we believe that companies like Greenhost, -driven by principles, not just profits- are needed more than ever.

Over the past few years, we’ve explored various ways to secure our future by building a more robust business model, all while safeguarding our ideals. We explored the possibility of partnering with socially conscious investors and implementing a steward-ownership model. Ultimately, we found that joining forces with TSG enables us to stay true to our values while benefiting from the stability and resources of a larger organization.

TSG is a family of companies with values that we strongly identify with. TSG focuses on strengthening the sharing economy and aims to accelerate the energy transition — goals that align closely with our own green objectives. Since 2023, TSG has also been moving toward a steward-ownership model, prioritizing societal impact over financial profit.

Within TSG, Greenhost will remain largely autonomous. Our name, our team, and our products will stay the same and we will continue to prioritize sustainability, digital civil rights, security, and open-source software.

At the same time, this partnership opens up new opportunities. Greenhost will take a leading role in developing cloud services for the group, providing a meaningful alternative to Big Tech.

We are confident that this collaboration will strengthen our mission and help us make an even bigger impact. As always, if you have questions, we are happy to answer them.

New release cycle PHP

2024-05-21T19:30:00+00:00

As you might know, every year a new PHP-version is released. This year that was PHP 8.3. We try to offer this new version on our hosting platform as soon as a stable release is available.

Together with the adding of a new version, each year support for an older version was dropped. PHP developers no longer supported the older versions and, as a result, we could no longer securely offer these versions. This is why we removed these older PHP-versions for our customers at that point. This has resulted in problems, such as websites that were no longer functioning correctly, but in the trade-off between customer convenience and security, we opted for security.

Recently, the PHP developers decided to extend the period in which security updates were applied. From this year onward, every version gets two years of active support and two years of security support.

We are happy with this decision, and we are glad to follow that schedule. This means we will not phase out a PHP version this year. PHP 8.1 is the oldest supported version, and we will keep offering that until the end of 2025.

Evidently, for the security of your website it remains crucial that the used CMS (Content Management System, such as Wordpress), themes and plugins are up-to-date.

Next to the security involved, in most cases a newer PHP version and an up-to-date CMS will result in better website performance. That is why we still advise to upgrade to the newest PHP version at an early stage. If that causes issues, you can easily switch back or research if there are alternatives to outdated software you might be using.

You can switch between active PHP versions in our Service Centre. More information on how to change the version can be found on our Helpdesk pages.

If you have any questions on this, please contact us through support@greenhost.net.

Service Centre redesign

2023-08-02T11:00:00Z

For the past ten years, we have been using the familiar User Interface (UI) of our Service Centre to manage technical tasks, make administrative changes and everything in between. The functionality of our Service Centre has expanded steadily over the years, but the design and structure of these pages have never received the attention they deserve.

Today, we are excited to introduce the first step in the design project that aims to rectify this. We plan to enhance the user experience without compromising the functionality you already know. Because the Service Centre has grown to be a large system with many interdependent functions, we will deploy the design changes bit by bit. Making incremental improvements over a longer period of time.

First step 👟

The first step in this process happens today. We are now introducing the renewed header and sidebar. You may notice that it is using our brand colors and a new font. Even though this is just a small change, we are already very excited about this! With good reason, because behind the scenes much more has already been changed in preparation for next steps.

Screenshot of the new UI

Screenshot of the old UI

When it came to working on this redesign, we were blocked by the monolithic design of the original Service Centre. It was not built in a way that allows easy replacement of one piece without interrupting the function of all other pieces. We are solving this by slowly decoupling the front-end (what you see as a user) from the back-end (the systems and databases that store the changes you make in the front-end). This is done with MFEs (micro front-ends). This offers us a lot of flexibility, and allows us to improve on the design and function of the Service Centre in small incremental steps.

Design principles 🎨

We’re not just adding our company colors, we have thought a lot about the design. Our goal is to ensure that our customers feel empowered. We’re aiming to make the existing features easier to find and more intuitive to use without sacrificing functionality and flexibility. But we also want using it to feel pleasant, and we are even trying to inject a little bit of fun.

We are not starting from scratch, we are streamlining what already works, improving things where possible, and repairing or redesigning the sections that really need it.

Small screen friendly 🐜

The old Service Centre was technically usable on a smart phone or other small screen, but it was never designed with that in mind. So it is not pleasant to use, but a nice option to have in case of emergencies. It can be used with a lot of zooming in and zooming out, if you already know what you are looking for.

With the new UI we are keeping the small screen in mind from the start. The header menu scales with the size of the screen. The sidebar will be made collapsible. When starting work on the UI of the pages we will keep the small screen in mind there too.

What’s next? 🕐

Currently, our focus is on our VPS pages. We hope to share more news about this with you soon!

After this we will work to, one-by-one, improve the pages under "Administration" and "Hosting".

Have a look 👀

In the meantime, we invite you to visit our Service Centre and explore the changes we have already made. We have been testing the current improvements for a while already, and as daily users of the Service Centre ourselves we are already very happy with the changes!

If, for any reason, you want to go back to the old design, that will remain possible. At least during the testing period we will offer the option to switch back to the old version of the UI. There is a button for this located at the bottom left of the page, labeled "New UI".

We would love to hear from you. Do you like the changes? Do you dislike it? Is something not working as you expect? Do you have suggestions for future changes? Please get in touch! Send us an email or leave a note via our contact form

Get your Greenhost VPS prepared for upgrading to Debian 12 / Ubuntu 22.04

2023-06-06T12:00:00+00:00

Planning to upgrade your Greenhost VPS? Great! Keeping a VPS's operating system up to date is important to make sure it keeps running smoothly and safely. OS updates bring new features, as well as security improvements, bug fixes, and resource-saving optimisations.

The latest versions of Debian and Ubuntu made a significant change in how some system files are stored. In some situations, you will need to do a quick and simple intervention before upgrading to Debian 12 Bookworm, releasing today (June 6th, 2023), or Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish, as the upgrade will not work out of the box on a Greenhost VPS.

This article will tell you how to check if you need to do the intervention, and will guide you through the required steps.

Debian 12 installer banner (CC-BY-SA-4.0 – Juliette Taka)

A bit of context

History of the Linux system files

Historically, Linux distributions placed some system files in the /bin, /sbin and /lib directories, while other system files were placed in the /usr directory, in similarly named sub-directories /usr/bin, /usr/sbin or /usr/lib. The first three directories would usually be mounted on a smaller but faster disk, as they contain information necessary to mount the slower but bigger /usr partition. With disks becoming bigger, faster and cheaper, this is not something that is done any more: all those directories are now typically on the same disk ¹.

For that reason, the separation between a directory at the root of the disk (/) and its equivalent in /usr is not needed anymore. To make things easier and reduce confusion, distributions started to merge directories in what is called the merged /usr directories scheme. From Debian 10 ² and Ubuntu 19.04 ³, new installations are made with this scheme, while upgrades from previous versions would keep the scheme they already had. However, starting from Debian 12 and Ubuntu 22.04, the new scheme is now enforced during the upgrade process, which now requires installing and using the usrmerge package, whose purpose is to move the files around according to the new scheme.

How Greenhost VPSs are started

In order for our customers to get the best of their VPSs and ensure regular security updates, these are by default started with our own build of the Linux kernel. For this to work, we are mounting an in-memory file system containing the kernel modules on /lib/modules.

This approach works with both the old and the new directory scheme. On the new scheme there will be a symbolic link from /lib to /usr/lib, making the kernel modules mounted on /usr/lib/modules instead.

However, upgrading a running VPS from the old scheme to the new one is more complicated: usrmerge does not support this way of loading kernel modules, which means an upgrade will fail with the following message:

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mv: cannot move '/lib/modules' to '/usr/lib/modules': Device or resource busy

FATAL ERROR:
mv --no-clobber /lib/modules /usr/lib/modules: rc=1

To allow the tool to run, /lib/modules needs to be unmounted first. To unmount it safely, it first has to be freed from handles, so we need to stop the systemd-udevd service. Then, usrmerge can be installed without issue.

However, if we were to only do that, the VPS would lose access to the kernel modules until the next reboot. So we need to move the mount containing the modules to a temporary location, and then move it to /usr/lib/modules after the upgrade.

Make sure your VPS is ready for the upgrade

You can find out whether you need to take action on your VPS by logging in and running the command: readlink /lib. If you get usr/lib as output, you don't have to do anything for this VPS. If instead you get no output, please keep reading.

First you need to make sure that your VPS is up-to-date: run the command apt-cache policy usrmerge. If you get the message N: Unable to locate package usrmerge, you have to upgrade your operating system to Debian 10 Buster or Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus. Please refer to your distribution's documentation on how to do that.

Then, acquire root rights and run the following commands in succession:

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mkdir /tmp/temp_modules
mount --bind /lib/modules /tmp/temp_modules

systemctl stop systemd-udevd
# You can safely ignore the warnings about the service being still able to be activated by sockets.
umount /lib/modules
apt install usrmerge
# Answer Yes if prompted to convert to the merged /usr directories scheme.
mount --bind /tmp/temp_modules /usr/lib/modules
systemctl start systemd-udevd

umount /tmp/temp_modules
rmdir /tmp/temp_modules

If you didn't get any error messages, you are now successfully able to upgrade to Debian 12 Bookworm or Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish!

Otherwise, please contact our support, we will be happy to help you.

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseForTheUsrMerge/#example ↩
This is true for official installation media, but whether the scheme was enabled or not depends on the version of debootrap used for the install. On our infrastructure, newer installations of Debian 9 came with this scheme. https://wiki.debian.org/UsrMerge ↩
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2018-November/001253.html ↩