Saving a 10,000-mile car journey’s worth of energy every festival

We’ve optimised the hosting setup of Edinburgh International Festival's website to help them towards achieving their impressively ambitious sustainability goals.

Here at Supercool, we work closely with our hosting partner, Servd, to help us on our mission to create even 'greener' (and more accessible) websites.

As with many festivals, Edinburgh International Festival’s website sees a considerable spike in traffic during announcements and on-sales. Traffic also tends to climb during July, and the website remains busy through August as audiences enjoy the festival.

The hosting setup we inherited from a previous supplier used several dedicated servers – for application, database, cache, and SSL termination — all designed to handle those significant traffic spikes.

As robust as this setup was, there was no simple method for reducing that huge capacity during quieter periods. Its rigidity also gave the setup a definite ceiling – making it complex to increase capacity still further if we needed to.

So, we recently migrated the website from that legacy hosting infrastructure to a new cloud-based setup.

This new infrastructure offers greater flexibility and security. A primary driver for this change, however, was the ability to optimise the website’s energy usage.

We’ve done some top-level calculations to understand the impact of migrating to the new setup on how much energy the website uses.
 

And there's been a significant change in website hosting annual energy consumption:

Legacy setup: 3,285kWh = 680.16kgCO2e

New setup: 419kWh = 86.8kgCO2e

Annual saving/reduction: 2,866kWh = 595.4kgCO2e

kWh: kilowatt-hour / CO2e: carbon dioxide and equivalent greenhouse gases

Calculations are based on the 2024 combined emissions factor for grid electricity 0.20705kgCO2e = 1kWh

This energy reduction of 2,866kWh equates to around 595.4kgCO2e. So, that's over half a tonne of carbon dioxide and equivalent greenhouse gases that are no longer going into the atmosphere every year. Just from optimising the hosting setup. That's huge!

For context, an average UK household uses around 2,700kWh of energy a year. And a 10,000 mile journey in an electric car uses around 2,500kWh.

We’re really pleased with what we've achieved so far. But this isn't the end – we'll keep looking for ways to reduce the negative environmental impact of the websites we build.