Static, Fast and Green!

Static websites are all the rage at the moment, and rightly so. There are a growing number of static site generators and a handful of decent content management systems that broaden their appeal well beyond the initial developer user base.

Static sites don’t have the cost and administrative hassle associated with most web hosting and in fact can often be hosted for free.

They are also incredibly fast. With no database connections and computation they load many times faster than dynamically-generated websites. Even better, entire pages can be cached and delivered from CDN servers across the globe meaning near-instantaneous loading anywhere in the world.

All of this has a massive but largely un-celebrated side effect: static websites consume vastly less energy than other websites. This is great news for helping address the climate emergency but can we go a step further?

I’ve been exploring ways to host static sites (like this one) on 100% green servers and have settled on a setup I’m fairly happy with.

Cloudflare CDN

Cloudflare is a powerful tool that makes it easy to manage domain names and SSL certificates. It also has an amazing trick up its sleeve: any traffic routed through them is cached through their CDN. This means that for free (on small websites) and with no setup, entire static websites can be cached across Cloudflare’s global network of CDN servers.

Excitingly, Cloudflare have announced that all their servers are now powered with renewable energy!

AWS S3

The static web hosting option on an S3 bucket allows you to turn a directory of files into a static website. A site built with any static site generator (SSG) can be uploaded to an S3 bucket and hosted for a handful of cents a year.

While Amazon has some distance to go on its sustainability journey, it does power a subset of its data centres with renewable energy and users can choose to use these by selecting an appropriate region when setting up their buckets.

To make hosting on S3 a bit simpler, it is possible to set up a CodePipeline that will automatically deploy updates from Github to your S3 bucket every time you make a change.

Considerations

Google Cloud Storage is another option for green static website hosting - offering a like-for-like replacement for S3.

It is worth highlighting that both S3 and GCS require a concession on security. Both provide simple file storage and, as such, cannot host SSL certificates. This means that it is not possible to secure the connection between Cloudflare and the S3 / GCS without introducing another tool (such as CloudFront). With SSL between the user and Cloudflare, this is fine for most public static sites as any user data will be handled via alternative routes.

NB: I’m investigating whether Google’s CDN Interconnect might solve this by facilitating end-to-end HTTPS.

Conclusion

This combination of S3 and Cloudflare can give you a fully green hosted website that loads at lightning speed anywhere in the world. It is also optimised to minimise the energy used to build and transfer the website every time it’s viewed.

To find out more about the impact of your website and how to reduce it, get in touch.