Receipts, not promises.
CO₂ equivalent · May 2026
Every Ciphera service runs on 100% renewable Swiss hydroelectric power. Here's what that actually costs the planet, measured with life-cycle assessment — not estimates.
Six ways your cloud footprint matters
Climate change is only one of them. We track all six, using the Boavizta life-cycle assessment framework.
Climate change
Global impact due to greenhouse-gas emissions (CO₂, CH₄, N₂O) that increase average global temperatures.
Water use
Freshwater consumption from lakes, rivers, or groundwater over the reporting period.
Fossil depletion
Decreased availability of fossil resources for future generations.
Mineral depletion
Decreased availability of mineral and metal resources for future generations.
Ozone depletion
Stratospheric ozone layer damage from emitted halocarbons (CFCs, HCFCs, halons).
Ionising radiation
Human health impact from ionising radiation exposure under normal operating conditions (excluding nuclear accidents).
60% Hydroelectric
Alpine reservoirs
30% Nuclear
Low-carbon baseload
~12 gCO₂e/kWh
Swiss grid intensity
The cleanest grid in Europe, by accident of geography.
Switzerland was burning coal until 1961. Then the Alps gave them 60% of their electricity for free — gravity doing the work — and uranium covered the rest. The result is a grid that runs at roughly 12 grams of CO₂ per kilowatt-hour, compared to ~400 across the EU average and ~650 in the United States.
- Zurich & Geneva datacenters: 100% renewable contracts
- Zero natural gas peaker plants on the Swiss grid
- Source: Swiss Federal Office of Energy (BFE), annualized 2025
Small by design.
We run lean on purpose. Every additional server is a liability — for our security posture, our budget, and our carbon footprint. The smallest possible fleet is the honest answer.
Virtual machines
Entire Ciphera fleet — identity, analytics, website, observability, email
Swiss zones
Zurich (primary) + Geneva (regional failover) — 100% on Swiss soil
Renewable power
Swiss grid: ~60% hydro, ~30% nuclear, ~10% other renewables
We count the whole lifecycle, not just the plug.
Most cloud providers report the CO₂ from electricity use and stop there. That's the “plug” phase — and it's only part of the real impact.
Every server is manufactured, shipped, used for years, then decommissioned. Each step has its own carbon cost. We use the Boavizta life-cycle assessment framework, which tracks all four phases — so we can show you the whole picture.
Use phase is only 9% of our real impact. Most cloud providers hide the other 91%.
How we measure this
No magic, no marketing. Here's exactly where the numbers come from.
Source of truth
Numbers come directly from our hosting provider's LCA measurement API, which implements the Boavizta life-cycle assessment framework. Every request is HMAC-signed, logged, and cached for 24 hours.
If the measurement API is unavailable, we fall back to numbers computed from our published instance inventory using Boavizta's open emissions factors. The source badge at the top of this page tells you which path served the current numbers — currently: Computed fallback.
What's included (and what isn't)
We count:
- ✓ Compute — all 9 VMs across all zones
- ✓ Object storage — DB backups, Docker registry, MTA-STS
- ✓ All four lifecycle phases: manufacturing, transport, use, end-of-life
We don't count:
- ✗ Bunny CDN edge delivery
- ✗ Office electricity (we have no office)
- ✗ Employee travel (zero flights in 2026)
- ✗ Fallback path: use-phase computed from published factors, not measured
Refresh cadence
This page is regenerated every 24 hours. Our provider's environmental API itself recomputes roughly monthly, so the reporting period may lag 3–5 days behind the current date. The badge at the top always shows the month the numbers cover. Our provider's environmental API is in public BETA — if the schema changes or the endpoint is retired, we'll automatically switch to the fallback path without breaking the page.
Factors version: 2026.2 · Grid intensity source: Swiss Federal Office of Energy (BFE), 2025 annualized
We don't buy carbon offsets. We don't plant trees for PR. We don't claim “carbon neutral” — that word has been drained of meaning by companies that bought it.
We run small. We run on hydro. We show every number. And when the numbers get worse, we'll tell you that too.
That's the deal.
See what it looks like to pick a provider that measures itself.
Ciphera builds privacy-first infrastructure that takes transparency seriously — from zero-knowledge encryption to the carbon footprint of the servers running the whole thing.