Just to add another data point here: this is also something I’m very concerned about. I’ve had customers asking me about our product’s carbon impact, and in terms of web hosting this thread is the best information we can offer them.
As a case in point, Cloudflare have been 100% renewable since 2018, and are committed to remaining so indefinitely and to actively removing greenhouse gases from the environment equivalent to all their entire historical emissions by 2025: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-committed-to-building-a-greener-internet/.
I’d love to see Netlify do something similar - at the absolute minimum to provide concrete numbers on the current situation, but preferably to commit to net-zero by some date in the near future. The current sustainability page is a start, but seems to mostly be a marketing effort rather than providing much real information.
I’m sympathetic that it’s hard to know the mix of providers that will be used in future, but it seems it should be possible to estimate past emissions based on real usage of each provider, and at least providing renewal percentages for the previous months or years would be a good start that could show progress towards zero.
At the moment it feels like Netlify is the worst of all cloud providers available. It’s increasingly difficult to justify hosting with Netlify to customers concerned about sustainability when there are many other 100% renewable alternatives out there.