Every activity that’s performed online comes at a cost to the environment. A lot of that is due to the electricity needed to power devices, but a significant amount comes from the vast servers that store content for when we need to access it.
Cobiro adopts the JAMstack approach, which means that its carbon footprint is much smaller than that of a traditional website system.
JAMstack vs traditional websites
Websites deliver content to visitors via servers.
If we take a traditional content management system, it relies on a single, origin server to handle every request. This means that for every interaction a website visitor makes, such as loading a new page, the data has to be sent and retrieved from the origin server.
A JAMstack website is pre-built and severless. Or in other words, content is generated in advance and distributed via a Content Delivery Network (CDN) — only called upon when it’s needed — which saves valuable time and resources.
What’s a CDN?
JAMstack sites use a CDN to deliver content to the website user. A CDN is a global network of data points that work together to reduce the distance a website’s content has to travel before it reaches the end user.
A CDN stores a cached version of your website content (the static part) in numerous data centers across the world. When a website user makes a request, the cached content is gathered from the closest center to where they’re based, rather than making a return trip to the website’s origin server.
So for example, if a person in Paris is viewing your US hosted website, any content they request is accessed from a data center in France rather than the website’s origin server in the US.
Reducing energy consumption
JAMstack’s “event-driven” approach to content delivery — running only when it’s required and fetching content from a data center closest to the website user means it uses only a fraction of energy compared to the traditional “always-on” approach.
Plus, not only is it better for the environment, it actually provides a superior user experience too. Web pages load incredibly fast, and they’re more secure.
Imagine the possibilities of an internet consisting of only JAMstack websites!
Read Cobiro’s complete guide to JAMstack
Sustainable website hosting
Websites built with Cobiro are hosted through Cloudflare’s CDN, which is also committed to reducing its own carbon footprint.
It’s on a mission to power the internet with zero carbon emissions by 2025, and furthermore, remove all historical carbon its global network has emitted since the company was founded.
As well as powering its data centers with renewable energy, Cloudflare also plans to help customers understand their individual footprints and approximate savings in comparison to internet averages. Watch this space!
Build a sustainable website with Cobiro
Every website that’s built with Cobiro is a JAMstack website. So you can be confident that the architecture that powers it is kinder to the environment, and every new visitor that accesses it will do so via the most sustainable method possible.
Originally published at https://cobiro.com on October 8, 2021.
