Put the marketing sites of ten well-known web hosts through the Green Web Foundation’s check and all ten come back green. For eight of them, the reason given is Cloudflare, the network in front of their websites. That result says nothing about the servers those hosts sell you.
To judge a green host, you need to know what it bought, how much of its setup the purchase covers, and how fast the servers under it run.
GreenGeeks leads this list because its green case is the easiest to trace. Its eco-friendly web hosting claim rests on wind energy certificates that the Bonneville Environmental Foundation buys on its behalf. Those certificates add up to three times the energy GreenGeeks estimates it uses. The other five use different mechanisms, and the table puts each one next to its speed stack.
| Host | Green mechanism | What it covers | Speed stack |
| GreenGeeks | Wind certificates bought through the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, at 300% | Web hosting server energy, per its EPA record | LiteSpeed with LSCache, HTTP/3, free CDN integration |
| SiteGround | Inherited from Google Cloud’s renewable purchasing | Google’s annual electricity use | Google Cloud, multilevel caching, CDN |
| InMotion Hosting | Efficiency and reused hardware | Its own data center and server line | UltraStack (NGINX, PHP-FPM, OPcache, Redis), NVMe |
| Hostinger | Certificates and supply contracts at 100% | Data center electricity | LiteSpeed, NVMe, object cache |
| HostPapa | Green-e certified certificates from the same foundation, at 100% | Yearly electricity use | NVMe, CloudLinux isolation, CDN on most plans |
| IONOS | Owned data centers on renewable power, some solar on site | Its own data centers and infrastructure | NVMe, CPU priority tiers, HTTP/2 |
Is Green Hosting Slower?
No. A site’s speed comes from the server software, the caching, the storage, the network protocol, the CDN and how far the server is from your visitors, and none of those care where a host’s energy certificates come from. Every host on this list pairs its green claim with a real performance stack, whether that’s LiteSpeed, an NGINX build or Google’s network. A green badge won’t make a slow host fast either.
1. GreenGeeks, Matched by Wind Certificates
The certificates behind GreenGeeks’ claim have a named supplier, a stated multiple and a federal record. The company has been an EPA Green Power Partner since 2009, and the EPA scopes its 300% wind match to the energy its web hosting servers use.
For speed, GreenGeeks runs LiteSpeed with LSCache, which caches pages at the server level instead of through a plugin. The shared plans add HTTP/3 and the latest PHP, plus a free CDN integration that connects to Cloudflare in one click.
Those certificates are still claims bought against grid power. The EPA record lists 0 kWh of on-site generation, so the servers run on whatever the local grid supplies. The match also stops at server energy and leaves out the cooling and the building around it.
2. SiteGround on Google Cloud
SiteGround‘s speed comes from Google Cloud infrastructure plus its own caching. Every plan gets multilevel caching, custom PHP and MySQL setups and a free CDN across more than 170 locations.
Its green claim comes from the same place. SiteGround doesn’t run its own data centers and says it relies on Google Cloud’s green policies. Google has bought renewable energy equal to 100% of the power it uses each year since 2017. Measured hour by hour, though, it reached 66% carbon-free energy in 2024, so some hours still run on fossil power. SiteGround’s own part is on the software side, where it tunes its servers so sites use fewer resources and less energy.
3. InMotion Hosting and Reused Hardware
InMotion Hosting doesn’t lead with certificates. Its stated view is that it’s better to cut energy use than to simply offset it. Its green data center in Los Angeles cut cooling costs by nearly 70%. In 2025 it formalized an Eco-Friendly Server line of refurbished enterprise hardware that’s wiped, retested and put back into service. Shared plans run on NVMe storage with UltraStack, which pairs NGINX with PHP-FPM, OPcache and Redis.
The efficiency figures are old, though. They go back to a project that started in 2010, so if you need a current share of renewable power to quote, ask InMotion for it.
4. Hostinger’s Emissions Report
Hostinger publishes the most detailed numbers here. Its annual sustainability report breaks emissions down by scope. For 2025 it lists 0.2 metric tons of CO2e in Scope 1, 23 in market-based Scope 2 and 20,656 in Scope 3, its supply chain and other indirect sources. It says it matched all of its data centers’ power with renewable energy, using certificates, direct supply deals or both. Its plans run on LiteSpeed servers with NVMe storage and object caching, and a CDN comes with the middle tier and up.
The renewable matching runs through its colocation partners’ facilities, so the physical power mix is a separate question. It also says all of its decommissioned servers and switches were reused or recycled through certified partners.
5. HostPapa With Green-e Certificates
HostPapa buys its certificates from the same supplier as GreenGeeks, the Bonneville Environmental Foundation. They’re Green-e certified and match 100% of its yearly power use. Its hosting runs on NVMe drives, CloudLinux keeps each account’s resources separate, and most plans include a CDN.
The green claim has moved off HostPapa’s homepage and into its blog and help pages, so you’ll have to dig to confirm it. Its data centers are in North America and Europe, and its plans come with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
6. IONOS and Its Own Solar Power
IONOS owns its data centers and makes some of its own power. Three of its nine data centers make solar power on site, 2.8 GWh of it in 2025, and IONOS says 99.8% of the energy used across its infrastructure that year came from renewable sources. All plans use NVMe storage with CPU priority that rises by tier, and the Starter plan and up include a CDN.
The plan page advertises HTTP/2, one version behind HTTP/3. Six of its nine data centers also use biofuels, and every plan carries a 99.99% uptime guarantee.
How to Check a Host’s Green Claim
What an EPA Green Power Partner Record Shows
An EPA Green Power Partner record lists how much electricity a partner covers, what percentage of its use that is, the resource type, the supplier and how much power it generates on site. A figure like 300% or 100% counts certificates, and a record showing no on-site generation means the percentage describes a purchase, not the electricity running through the building. The record’s description gives the scope.
What a Green Web Foundation Lookup Shows
The Green Web Foundation check looks at whichever server answers for the address you type. On September 26, 2026, the websites of all six hosts here passed. GreenGeeks, InMotion, Hostinger and HostPapa passed because their sites run behind Cloudflare, SiteGround passed through Google Cloud and IONOS through its own report. The useful test is your own site’s address, run after the site is live on the new host.
Wording You Can Publish About Your Green Host
For a sustainability page, match the sentence to the mechanism.
- GreenGeeks: “Our hosting provider buys wind energy certificates equal to 300% of the energy its servers use.”
- SiteGround: “Our site runs on Google Cloud, which buys renewable energy equal to its annual electricity use.”
- InMotion Hosting: “Our host works to cut energy use in its data centers and reuses refurbished server hardware.”
- Hostinger: “Our host matches its data centers’ electricity with renewable energy and reports its emissions by scope every year.”
- HostPapa: “Our host buys certified renewable energy certificates equal to the power it uses each year.”
- IONOS: “Our host runs its own data centers on renewable electricity and generates some solar power on site.”
Leave out “powered by wind,” “carbon neutral” and “zero emissions,” since none of these mechanisms supports them for a site on shared hosting.
