Our digital footprint

A website doesn’t look like much, but it runs somewhere: a server switched on around the clock, electricity, hardware built on the other side of the world. At Semisto, we spend our days regenerating living systems — which makes it hard to justify running our own site just anywhere. So we picked our host the way we’d pick a species for a food forest: by looking at what it actually does, not what it promises.

The internet pollutes — ours too

Let’s start with honesty: no website is “green.” Even the leanest hosting consumes energy and wears down hardware. Infomaniak, the Swiss host we use, says so plainly in its own campaign — “we pollute.” We’ll take that over the usual greenwashing any day. The real question isn’t “is this zero impact?” (that doesn’t exist), but “are we doing everything we can to reduce that impact, and offset the rest?”

Why Infomaniak

Our site runs on a private server (VPS) at Infomaniak, an independent Swiss company that builds and operates its own data centers. What tipped the decision, concretely:

• 100% renewable energy, certified and locally sourced, across their whole infrastructure.
• Data centers cooled with outside air, no air conditioning, with a power usage effectiveness (PUE) under 1.1 — among the most efficient in the world.
• Server heat is recovered. Their newest data center feeds 1.7 MW back into an urban district heating network — enough to heat close to 6,000 low-energy homes, for at least twenty years. A server that heats houses instead of the atmosphere.
• Servers kept for 15 years instead of 3 to 5. Building a server emits roughly 1.7 tonnes of CO₂; making it last avoids repeating that debt.
• Remaining CO₂ is offset at 200% — 100% in Switzerland, 100% abroad.
• ISO 14001 and ISO 50001 certified, audited every year by an independent body. And our data stays in Switzerland.

Our part of the work

Picking a good host is necessary, but not sufficient. On our end, we built a deliberately lean site: lightweight static pages, optimised images, no trackers running in the background. Less code to execute means less energy per visit — including yours.

What this actually changes

Let’s be clear: good hosting doesn’t “save” anything. Semisto’s real lever is the trees we plant, the soil we regenerate, the food forests that capture carbon for decades. Our hosting is the minimum coherence: not undoing with one hand what we build with the other.

Want to check for yourself? Infomaniak publishes the full detail on its dedicated ecology page.