A claim of „carbon-negative“ from an internet company ought to sound faintly incredible. If we were you, we would want the workings. Here they are.
2006: certificates, and getting the easy part right
In our early years, finding servers that ran directly on clean energy was close to impossible, so we bought renewable energy certificates. What we could control completely, we did: every location we worked from ran on clean energy, which also removed the ordinary footprint of a commercial building — lights and climate control running around the clock — and the commuting that goes with it. That left the servers as the only open question.
At the peak of that period we were retiring up to 40,000 kWh a year of Green-e certified renewable energy certificates, covering the servers, the supporting infrastructure and all company travel. Over a year those certificates represented around 51,000 pounds of CO2 not emitted — roughly what twenty acres of trees take out of the air.
Then: servers on renewables, and dropping the asterisk
Eventually we found the upstream provider our servers have now lived with for over a decade, powered directly by renewable energy. At that point we could stop relying on the certificate system, which people reasonably criticize for not conveying real neutrality on its own. Carbon-neutral became a claim we could make without caveats.
Now: more electricity out than in
The main office is a home, fitted with what the installers described as „clearly too many solar panels“. Whatever the panels do not cover still arrives from renewable sources. The consequence, measured by the electricity supplier rather than by us, is a net export.
Show me the receipts
A hosting company claiming to be carbon-negative should be made to prove it.
Fair enough — we would want proof too. In 2006 there was almost nowhere to rent a server that ran on clean energy, so we bought renewable energy certificates and made sure every office we worked from was on a certified renewable tariff. No commute, no separate building running lights and air conditioning around the clock.
Then we found the upstream provider our servers have lived with for over a decade, powered directly by renewables. At that point „carbon-neutral“ stopped needing an asterisk about carbon trading.
Today the main office is a home with what the installers described as „clearly too many solar panels“. Anything the panels do not cover still arrives on a renewable tariff. The result is that we put more electricity into the grid than we take out — and a meaningful share of what we export, we are never paid for.
Grid electricity, measured
From the electricity supplier’s own records.
| Year | Injected | Pulled | Net |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | 3,097 kWh | 2,592 kWh | +505 |
| 2023 | 1,728 kWh | 1,265 kWh | +463 |
Each year we export roughly what an average household uses in two to three months — over and above everything we consume ourselves.
Recognized by
Named a Voice For Impact 2025 by the American Sustainable Business Network.
What those numbers mean in ordinary terms
Bare kilowatt-hours are hard to picture. Put it this way: each year, the renewable electricity we push into the grid over and above everything we consume is roughly what an average household uses in two to three months. And a substantial part of that export is electricity we are never paid for.
What we are not claiming
Truly sustainable web hosting is not possible yet, and we would rather say so than pretend. Until computers are fully recyclable and compostable, the manufacturing footprint of the hardware remains real and sits outside these figures. We are working toward an ideal that has not been reached. When the compostable computer arrives, we will be first in the queue.
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