When you build a website, it’s easy to think of it as something that only exists on a screen — weightless, invisible, with no real-world footprint. But every site you visit runs on physical servers, in physical data centres, drawing real electricity from a real power grid.
The internet has a carbon footprint, and at XVNWeb, we think about ours seriously.
Here’s a look at how we keep our environmental impact as low as possible — and how a small slice of every sale you make with us goes toward pulling carbon out of the atmosphere altogether.
Hosting on Infrastructure Built for Efficiency
We host client sites using Amazon Web Services (AWS), and that choice isn’t just about reliability and speed — it’s also about sustainability.
AWS has matched 100% of the electricity used across its global operations, including its data centres, with renewable energy sources for several years running, and the company is targeting net-zero carbon across its operations by 2040 as part of Amazon’s Climate Pledge. Behind the scenes, AWS has also been redesigning its data centres to use less energy in the first place — including lower-carbon concrete, more efficient cooling systems, and hardware engineered to squeeze more performance out of every watt.
The practical upshot for a hosting customer like us: running a website on AWS’s shared, highly optimised infrastructure is dramatically more efficient than the alternative of many businesses each running their own small server in their own office or data closet. Independent research (commissioned by AWS but conducted by outside analysts) has estimated that AWS’s infrastructure can be several times more energy-efficient than typical on-premises setups, in part because of how heavily the underlying hardware is shared and utilised across thousands of customers rather than sitting half-idle.
In short: by hosting on AWS instead of smaller, less efficient servers, we’re already starting from a greener baseline before a single line of code is written.
Cloudflare: Speed and Sustainability, Together
Alongside AWS, we route traffic for our web hosting services through Cloudflare, which gives us two wins at once — faster load times for visitors, and a lighter environmental load.
Cloudflare’s network is built around a simple idea: the less hardware you need, and the more efficiently that hardware runs, the smaller your footprint. Cloudflare has invested heavily in energy-efficient processors (its Arm-based edge servers are designed to deliver significantly more performance per watt than older server generations) and has worked toward matching its network’s electricity use with renewable sources.
There’s also a more indirect benefit. Cloudflare’s content delivery network caches website content at locations physically closer to your visitors. That means less data travelling long distances across the internet, fewer servers working harder than they need to, and faster pages for the people viewing the site. Independent studies have found that consolidating security, performance, and networking functions onto a platform like Cloudflare — rather than running that infrastructure on dedicated on-premises hardware — can cut associated energy use substantially, in some cases by well over half.
For our clients, this means: a faster website and a smaller environmental cost per visitor. Those two things don’t usually come as a pair, but here they do.
Putting Our Money Where Our Values Are: Stripe Climate
Efficient infrastructure reduces the footprint we create. But we also wanted to do something that actively removes carbon already in the atmosphere — not just slow down how much we add.
That’s why XVNWeb contributes 0.5% of every sale to Stripe Climate.
Stripe Climate is a programme that pools contributions from thousands of businesses around the world and funds early-stage carbon removal technology — the kind of work that’s still too new and too expensive to attract large-scale investment on its own. Rather than buying cheap, already-mature carbon offsets, Stripe Climate deliberately backs higher-risk, higher-potential approaches: companies turning waste into permanently buried bio-oil, projects using crushed rock to draw CO₂ out of the air and lock it into soil or seawater, and direct air capture plants that pull carbon straight out of the atmosphere.
100% of every contribution goes toward this work — Stripe takes no fee. Much of the funding now flows through Frontier, an advance market commitment co-founded by Stripe (alongside companies like Alphabet, Shopify, and Meta) that has committed to purchasing over $1 billion of permanent carbon removal by 2030. Every contribution from a Stripe Climate business — including ours — adds to that collective buying power.
Why this matters for you
If you’re a client of ours, here’s the practical part: you don’t have to do anything extra. You don’t need to set up your own carbon offset programme, research which climate projects are legitimate, or add a sustainability line item to your budget. By simply doing business with us, a portion of what you spend is automatically directed toward vetted, scientifically-reviewed carbon removal projects.
That’s the real value of a pooled programme like this. No single small business generates enough revenue to meaningfully fund an industrial carbon-removal plant on its own. But thousands of businesses, each giving a small percentage, add up to something with real weight — exactly the kind of “everyone contributes a little, the whole adds up to a lot” effect that’s normally hard to achieve outside of taxation or large corporate budgets.
We track our contributions through Stripe’s dashboard, and we’re glad to be transparent about it — if you’re a client and want specifics on our running total, just ask us directly.
The Bigger Picture
None of this — efficient hosting, a smart CDN, a climate contribution — makes us a “zero carbon” business overnight. We don’t claim that. What it does mean is that the infrastructure choices behind your website, and a small piece of every invoice, are quietly working in the same direction: less waste, and active progress on removing what’s already been emitted.
We think that’s a better way to build the web — one where doing good business and doing right by the planet aren’t separate decisions.
Have questions about our sustainability practices or want to see our latest Stripe Climate contribution figures?
Leave a Reply