Infrastructure and energy
Our biggest footprint lives in the infrastructure that hosts every website, so that's where we start. The energy, the data centres, the hardware.
Our approach
What we focus on, and why.
Community and partnerships
We don't try to do this alone. Organisations already doing this well don't need us to reinvent it, they need funding, so that's what we put our revenue, time and effort behind.
Being a B Corp
This movement holds us honest and accountable to our mission and aspirations, and gives us the framework to build a more inclusive, equitable and fair economy.
Infrastructure and energy
Powering your website sustainably.
Krystal runs on power matched 100% with renewable energy. That's the language we use, and it's deliberate.
Green energy web hosting still relies on a national or regional grid, where renewable and fossil-fuel generation mix together. A data centre can't trace a single unit of electricity back to one wind farm or solar site. Matching isn't the same as running our infrastructure directly off green power. In practice, for every unit of electricity our data centres draw, an equivalent unit from a renewable source goes into the grid.
We don't own data centres. We rent room in facilities run by partners, and we weigh more than their energy source. We also look at how efficiently a facility runs, hardware lifecycle, and how fast a partner moves as the industry changes. Our flagship is Netwise East, run by Netwise.
PUE, or power usage effectiveness, measures how much extra energy a facility burns keeping itself running, beyond what reaches your server, the closer to 1.0, the less is lost to overhead. The UK average is 1.35. Netwise's most recent PUE is 1.17, reported for 2024/25 under the UK Climate Change Agreement, achieved through an evaporative cooling system that's refrigerant-free. That's well below the UK average.
Netwise East isn't our only site. Here's where the rest of our infrastructure gets its power from.
Telehouse North, London.
Connectivity and management, powered by a direct Power Purchase Agreement with the London Array, a named offshore wind farm in the Thames Estuary, contracted with RWE until 2035.
Iron Mountain, Amsterdam.
Part of our international infrastructure, running on a direct PPA with Sunrock, a Rotterdam-based solar developer, since May 2023.
Iron Mountain, New Jersey.
Hosts the largest rooftop solar array of any data centre in North America, 7.2MW of panels on the building itself, with battery storage arriving in 2026.
Iron Mountain, Phoenix.
Runs on hydroelectric power matched to our consumption hour by hour, not just annually, through a 10-year PPA with Rye Development, currently the gold standard for renewable matching.
Redcentric, London.
Our backup infrastructure.
We're a verified green host with the Green Web Foundation, an independent nonprofit that checks the evidence behind a host's renewable claims before listing them in their public directory. Independently checked, not self-reported. You can run the Green Web Check on your own website.
Infrastructure and energy
The bigger picture
Ever wondered how a web hosting company actually works, or where its environmental impact really sits? Here's a quick look at our value chain. It covers what happens before us, what we're responsible for and what happens after.
Before us
Factories that make servers
Power stations that generate electricity
Companies that build the software we use
Our work
Running our data centres
Supporting you (our customers)
How we treat our team and how we work
The energy we use
Choosing ethical partners
After us
Your website or app keeps using energy
The server gets old one day and must get recycled
The impact of the customer’s business using our platform
We're confident in how we run our part of the chain, but what happens on either side of it matters too. We keep measuring our impact, so we can see where the gaps are and where we're creating the most emissions. Our Climate Action Plan sets out what we're doing about it.
Climate action plan
We're committed to playing our part in limiting global warming to 1.5°C, in line with the Paris Agreement. Our plan covers 2026 to 2029, with time-bound targets, named owners and public reporting on our highest sources of emissions.
Community and partnerships
Backing the people already doing the work.
Providing a good service, one that's as ethical and green as we can make it, isn't enough on its own. We put our time, money and effort behind organisations already doing the important work. Here's how:
Tree planting and reforestation
We're committed to reforestation and rebuilding the ecosystems it depends on. Mature forests lock away carbon for centuries and support far more biodiversity than newly planted saplings alone, which is why we back long-term, well-managed projects.
Trees planted with 
to date
to date5
2
1
3
7
7
8
Previous commitments:
- 19,120 trees with Trees for Life. Rewilding Scotland's Highlands with biodiverse forests.See our progress
- Founding member of the Million Tree Pledge.See our progress
Ecologi
We offset every employee’s carbon for life through Ecologi, covering their footprint before Krystal and during their time here.
See our progressProud members of 1% for the Planet
Giving is core to how we measure our impact. Every year we commit part of our revenue to causes we choose and stand behind.
1%
of annual revenue committed every year
A look at some of what we funded in 2025:
- Ashden Climate Solutions. Ashden is a UK charity that finds and scales climate solutions worth funding, from clean energy to greener schools. We fund their Let's Go Zero campaign, helping UK schools reach zero carbon by 2030.
- Green Web Foundation. The Green Web Foundation holds the technology industry to its green energy claims. We are funding their research into how cloud providers can use carbon.txt to report sustainability data in one standard format.
- Project Salt Run. Our friend Hannah, founder of the Better Business Network, ran 100 marathons in 100 days across India to raise 1 million pounds for the various initiatives. We backed her challenge, supporting FrankWater, Big Change and ClientEarth along the way.
Being part of this network helps us find and fund projects we'd never come across alone, and choose causes that line up with what matters to us. Climate, water, and a cleaner web.
See our 1% for the Planet profileFree hosting for UK charities
We give UK-registered charities free hosting on one of our Amethyst plans. Charities do enormous work on tiny budgets, and taking the cost of hosting a website off that list is a small thing for us, but hopefully a helpful one for them.
1,500+
UK charities hosted for free
Members of Business Declares
Business Declares exists to inspire and accelerate climate action inside businesses, taking on what they call the "polycrisis", the climate, ecological and social emergencies hitting all at once. They're convinced individual companies doing their bit isn't enough on its own, so they campaign together for the government policy and regulation needed too. We joined to be part of that collective push, and to hold ourselves accountable along the way.
See our declaration
Being a B Corp
We strive to be honest and transparent in everything we do. B Corp holds us accountable to our promises and aspirations.
Krystal was founded to do right by customers and the planet, without treating its people as an afterthought. B Corp gave that ambition some shape. It became a clear internal objective, and a framework for building processes and a workplace that actually deliver on it.
We've been a Certified B Corp since 2023, certified against B Lab's previous standards.
B Lab certifies us against independent standards covering how we treat our environment, our people and how we're governed as a business. It's not self-reported. Our practices get checked, scored and reassessed every three years.
Intentions are easy to claim. Evidence is harder.
We're now working towards recertification under B Lab's new standards, a real step up from where we started. Being a B Corp means joining a global community of businesses trying to do better, and the new standards give that effort real structure, built around seven impact topics.
- Environmental stewardship and circularity. A smarter, more circular use of natural resources.
- Climate action. Cut in detail in our Climate Action Plan.
- Government affairs and collective action. Change beyond what we could drive alone, our position on lobbying is below.
- Justice, equity, diversity and inclusion. Equity and justice built into how we operate, our JEDI commitment is below.
- Human rights. Due diligence on how our business and operations affect people, in full below.
- Fair work. Fair workplaces and good jobs, the fuller story lives on our careers page.
- Purpose and stakeholder governance. A clear purpose, and weighing the interests of every stakeholder, not just shareholders.
Being a B Corp
Our public commitments
Three commitments that came directly out of our work on the new standards.
- Read our commitment
Justice, equity, diversity and inclusion
The justice, equity, diversity and inclusion work ahead of us needs more than good intentions. We've built an internal action plan with deadlines and goals, and published our first public commitment.
- Read our human rights commitment
Human rights
Grounded in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, backed by a full saliency assessment of where our own impact sits.
- Read our lobbying statement
Our approach to lobbying
Our approach to political engagement and lobbying.
Krystal EO
The impact we're building
Being a good business isn't only about the planet. It's also about who benefits from the value a business creates. Most people own their labour and nothing else, which is the quiet reason four decades of rising productivity haven't shown up in living standards. Employee ownership is one of the few ways to change that without asking people to find money they don't have.
That's the vision behind Krystal EO, the not-for-profit we help fund. It exists to acquire established UK businesses and make them permanently majority employee owned, at no cost to the employees. It's still early days, our first acquisition is still ahead, so here's what we're hoping it will achieve.
The case for employee ownership
30,000
UK businesses
expected to close this decade as their owners retire. Where the rest land will shape the country for years.
500,000
Employee owners
is the ambition by 2060. Long-dated on purpose, and built to keep turning after we've stopped pushing it.
8 to 12%
is how much more productive UK employee owned businesses are than the average (EOA, Ownership at Work and University of Stirling, 2023).
- It holds. Once a workforce becomes an owner, the stake can't be sold on, so it stays that way for everyone who joins later too.
- It reaches further. The benefits go past the payroll, into household security, local economies, tax receipts and less demand on welfare.
- It compounds. Profits from each business fund the next acquisition, so the impact grows instead of stopping.
This isn't just a cause we're backing. It's the future we want for Krystal too.
Green FAQs
Everything you need to know about our green credentials. Can’t find the answer you’re looking for? Reach out to our friendly team.