The website is a power hog
A website uses electricity. When it is stored, when it is delivered, when it is rendered in the browser – and every time it is thrown away and rebuilt after two years. Anyone talking about sustainable websites therefore cannot mean hosting alone. It is about the electricity mix, the efficiency of the data centres, the amount of code moved on every request – and how often a site has to be created from scratch at all.
At Relaunch24 we chose all four layers: Hetzner in Germany on 100 % green electricity, EU Hosting Only, a lean engine without a database – and websites that are not designed as disposable products.
100 % hydropower, German data centres, measurable efficiency
Our servers sit at Hetzner in Germany. The German sites have used renewable electricity since 2008 – currently 100 % hydropower from the Alpine region, documented with guarantees of origin. Compared with the German electricity mix, Hetzner saves around 77,000 tonnes of CO2 a year at these sites (source: green electricity certificate 2023–2025).
The source matters as much as how much electricity is used in the first place. Hetzner cools with outside air for almost the entire year, reuses waste heat for offices and production and needs no water cooling (WUE: 0 l/kWh). Power Usage Effectiveness – total power relative to IT power – sits between 1.10 and 1.16, averaging 1.13. The German industry average in 2024 was around 1.4. The closer the figure is to 1.0, the less energy is lost to cooling, UPS and buildings.
| Data centre | PUE |
|---|---|
| Hetzner (DE, avg) | 1.13 |
| DE industry average 2024 | ~1.4 |
| Older / inefficient DCs | ~1.8 |
Hetzner is still not “climate-neutral” – the company says so itself. EMAS and ISO 14001 certification mainly mean: measurable, auditable, disclosed every year. That is enough of a foundation for us, because we do not have to dress the infrastructure up. It is European, documented and clearly more efficient than the average.
Short routes in Europe instead of transatlantic detours
Every request that travels to Virginia or Singapore costs not only latency but also network energy. That is why our data, backups and delivery stay in the EU. Static assets are distributed by the Slovenian Bunny CDN – closer to devices, less load on the origin server. The core of the site stays in Germany. The same logic as EU Hosting Only: legally clear, geographically close, energetically shorter.
The engine: fewer processes, less electricity per request
Green electricity on a bloated stack is still waste. A classic WordPress site starts PHP, a database, often dozens of plugins and a bundle of tracker scripts on every request. Every SQL query, every cookie banner, every embedded US script is compute time – on the server and on the visitor’s device.
Our engine is deliberately the opposite:
- No classic database CMS. Kirby stores content as files. Zero SQL queries, no permanently running database process. More in Security without databases.
- One engine for every site. Not a hundred individual WordPress installs with a plugin zoo, but one centrally maintained stack. One update, many instances – instead of N times the hardware, N times MySQL, N times outdated ballast.
- No cookie banner by default. Without tracking pixels and a consent manager, entire JavaScript packages disappear that would otherwise be loaded, parsed and executed on every visit.
- A lean frontend. PHP, CSS, JavaScript, HTML5. No page-builder runtime, no unnecessary font and framework loads from US CDNs.
- No AI in the delivery path. Generative models on the request path would be the most expensive electricity a website can burn. Content and hosting stay in human hands – see Why Relaunch24 prefers not to rely on AI.
Fewer moving parts mean less CPU, less transfer, less heat. It is the same architectural decision that helps us with security and maintenance – ecologically it is not an extra, it is the consequence.
The underestimated footprint: the relaunch
The largest energy use of a website often sits not in the individual page view, but in the life cycle. The market average is a relaunch after around 2.6 years, earlier in some industries. Every relaunch means a new concept, new development, new assets, often new infrastructure – and the old site is discarded. We described this in Let’s stop the spread of disposable websites.
| Model | Relaunches / 10 years |
|---|---|
| Conventional website | ~4 |
| Relaunch24 | 0 |
A site that is maintained for ten years instead of rebuilt does not only save budget. It saves the embodied energy of design, development, migration and hardware that would otherwise be burned in the rhythm of election cycles and trend colours. Longevity is the most effective climate measure here.
What this means for operators
Sustainability is the sum of hydropower in German data centres, short routes in Europe and an architecture that does not waste electricity, data or hardware – today, and still in ten years.
