'green hosting' badges are mostly marketing

OP here. Audited GreenCloudVPS's "100% renewable" badge. REC purchases: 12 GWh/year. Actual footprint by prefix geolocation: 8.3 GWh in AS20473 (NJ, coal-heavy grid), 4.1 GWh in AS63949 (TX, gas-heavy), 1.2 GWh in AS14061 (AMS, actual wind).

[NJ] ===(REC)===> [Wind farm, OK]
[TX] ===(REC)===> [Solar, CA]
[AMS] ===(PPA)===> [Local wind]

RECs don't follow electrons. Their NJ load feeds from PSE&G. The OK wind farm? Not on that grid. This is basic physics. Anyone without ASN talking about "green hosting" is buying marketing.

RFC 8468 (IPPM) applies: you measure where the bits land, not where you wish they landed.

Hi there, Petra from GreenCloudVPS here. We appreciate the detailed analysis and take these questions seriously. Our REC strategy follows industry-standard approaches recommended by our upstream sustainability consultants. We maintain documentation for all renewable claims and are happy to share specifics where permissible under NDA. Our AMS facility operates under a direct PPA which we're quite proud of. :)

That said, we're always looking to improve transparency. I'll flag this thread to our sustainability team.

1. Petra's response is exactly what you'd expect
A. "industry-standard" = everyone does it
B. "upstream consultants" = blame someone else
C. NDA = you can't verify
2. What would actually help:

• Public PPA contracts with facility names
• Grid mix disclosure per PoP
• Third-party audit, not consultant

• HostHatch publishes hourly matched data — https://hosthatch.com
• Leaseweb has live dashboard

• 13.6 GWh actual load
• 12 GWh RECs (undercover!)
• Only 1.2 GWh real PPA

Yo this is wild. I always thoguht green hosting meant like... actually green? My server is in NJ and now im like 💀 did I just pay extra for a JPEG badge? GreenCloudVPS better come correct with the receipts or im moving to HostHatch!

Edge perspective: origin guilt doesn't cache. We pop where the electrons are dirty, it's a miss every time. My AMS origin is clean but my LAX edge? 38. It's 38. no units, just 38. Cache hit on AMS, miss on the rest. You can't just REC your way out of physical infrastructure. Pop the PPA or don't pop at all.

In APAC this is less common. Tokyo and Singapore grids have higher baseline nuclear/hydro, so "green" claims face less scrutiny. I audited CloudCone's Los Angeles facility last year — https://cloudcone.com — their PPA matched load within 8%. Not perfect, but directionally correct. Perhaps the issue is more acute in US markets where grid transparency is weaker.

So I wrote a thing at 3am

$ curl -s https://greencloudvps.com/sustainability | grep -i "ppa\|rec\|mwh" | wc -l
0

$ whois -h whois.radb.net -- '-i origin AS20473' | grep route | wc -l
847

847 prefixes, 0 numbers. Anyway. Idk why I do this. 💀

Petra if you're still reading: publish the contract names. Redact the rates. That's the minimum. Anything else is just idk why I do this.