Nowadays no company can function without a server; unfortunately, servers have serious drawbacks. As Edward Snowden has shown, their data is at risk of being accessed by state institutions and international corporations. In addition servers are complicated and force companies to spend a great deal of money on IT services. Also, servers are not sustainable; they consume a lot of power and their life is limited. Protonet, a start up from Hamburg / Germany, is here to to change this.

Protonet wanted to develop the first server that is simple, saves resources and gives users sovereignty over their data again. The first server truly serving people.

As the first private server, Protonet liberates users from their dependency on mail providers, iCloud or Facebook. It gives users control over their data back. Protonet is simple: it can be operated with a mere push of a button and is set up intuitively, easy enough to be operated and maintained by non-experts. Protonet is up to three times more fuel-efficient than comparable rack servers and, thanks to innovative passive cooling, offers longer life of hardware. Even the packaging made of corrugated cardboard can be re-used as a handy storage box.

Reactions to Protonet have been overwhelming. On Seedmatch, a crowdfunding platform, the project set a European record raising EUR 200,000 in 48 minutes. Magazines such as Spiegel Online and Wirtschaftswoche as well as TV channels ARD, ZDF and ntv have published and broadcasted extensive, positive contributions on the topic creating media value worth tens of millions. Deutsche-startups.de named Protonet the start-up of the year. Hamburg@work, the initiative of the Hanseatic City of Hamburg, awarded it the Webfuture Award, thereby confirming Protonet's mission that the time has come for the first server for people.

To achieve our goal we had to develop the first private server in the world. This means, the web interface had to lead from anywhere in the world back to the user’s server. To make handling and maintenance for non-experts as easy as possible the software and the hardware had to be designed user-friendly in an unprecedented way. For maximum sustainability we used innovative technology and carefully chose materials for the construction of the server.