Our footprint, and what we do about it.

Every server we operate sits in data centre parks in Falkenstein, Nuremberg and Helsinki. The German parks have run on electricity from renewable sources since 2008, hydropower under the current certificate, and the Helsinki park on wind and hydropower since it was built in 2018. The German sites are certified under EMAS, the EU's voluntary environmental management standard, which commits them to measuring and improving year on year. Their operator publishes all of this, certificates included, and says just as plainly that it is not yet climate neutral: its greenhouse gas inventory is still being completed. We repeat both halves.

A data centre's overhead is everything drawn beyond the machines themselves: cooling, lighting, losses in distribution. The parks we run in operate at a power usage effectiveness between 1.10 and 1.16, close to the floor; across the industry the average sits around 1.5. They are cooled by outside air for up to 98% of the year and use no water for it, and the waste heat warms the offices and workshops on site.

The carbon in a server is mostly spent before it is switched on, in making it. Our machines are dedicated servers kept for years, not instances spun up by the hour, and a cluster grows by adding a node rather than by replacing the lot. The servers themselves are built by the parks' operator with only the parts a server needs, kept in service for eight years on average, and when one is retired it is tested and resold, repaired if faulty, and recycled only when nothing else is left. The greenest server is usually the one already in the rack.

The team is remote: people work where they live, so there is no daily commute, and no building heated, cooled and lit for a hundred desks. A Greek company must keep a registered office, and ours is small. It runs on renewable electricity: we pay our supplier's renewable premium, so everything it draws is matched by renewable generation. Beyond the meter, the habits are small and kept: we avoid printing, what paper there is gets recycled along with everything else that can be, and we keep water use down. None of this is remarkable, and it should not need to be.

When we pick a supplier, where it runs and what powers it sit beside price and capability in the decision. We prefer providers that publish what powers them and buy renewable electricity, and we keep the list short: fewer suppliers, each one looked at properly. The second copy of every backup sits in another EU country, with a provider chosen the same way. The full list, and why each one is there, is on what we run on.

We do not call ourselves carbon neutral. Renewable electricity at the data centre and the office covers the largest part of our footprint, not all of it: the manufacture of the hardware, the networks in between, and our own travel to the conferences we sponsor are still there. Where we can measure, we will publish; where we cannot, we will not round up.