A tree? With hosting? Yes, it’s true. Dotster is so committed to green hosting that they will plant a tree for you. What they do is purchase a tree from the Trees for the Future program for every new hosting customer. That could include you.Trees for the Future has been working since 1989 to help communities around the world plant trees. People in developing communities come to them for help in saving their land and way of life. Trees for the Future provides training and seeds for tree planting in Africa, Asia and Latin America. How many trees have they already planted? 50 million and counting.
Dotster’s commitment to becoming a more sustainable business goes way beyond planting a tree for you. Their hosting infrastructure is designed for maximum reliability and efficiency. Efficient power usage offers a double benefit. First, the servers themselves have a lower carbon footprint and draw less power from the grid. Second, these servers need less cooling so that additional power to remove waste heat from the circuitry can be minimized.
What about dirty energy? Aren’t data centers driving us to generate large amounts of coal fired electricity? Yes, they certainly are. Steel making and heavy industry were huge draws on the power grid in the last century. Now it’s data centers for hosting and cloud services. Dotster recognizes that they could be contributing to the problem, so they’ve taken action by offsetting their server power consumption by purchasing renewable energy credits for 150% of what they draw. These credits are purchased by Bonneville Environmental Foundation, which supports renewable energy projects such as solar and wind, plus watershed restoration.
You may already be sold on the importance of sustainable business practices and willing to pay extra for hosting that supports your values. The good news is that eco-friendly hosting needn’t cost more than hosting that doesn’t care two hoots about the environment. In fact, you’ll look long and hard to find a better deal than you can get from Dotster to host your websites. It’s such a bargain that you can’t even afford to run your own servers.
Let’s look at what you get for your hosting dollar. By dollar, I mean $3.75 a month on the annual plan. That tiny sum buys you 10 GB of website disk space with 300 GB of monthly bandwidth. If you have a domain that gets anywhere near 300 GB of traffic each month, that $3.75 is mere pocket change. Ad traffic alone will pay for your hosting plan in an hour or less.
This basic hosting plan runs on Linux servers and supports a single domain. Oh, by the way, that domain is free for the first year. Just register your .com, .org, .info, .net, .biz or .us when you order your plan (Look for the coupon code on the hosting comparison page or remember that it’s FREEDOM15). You can set up unlimited subdomains on your domain if you want to subdivide your site that way. You also get 100 email accounts, 10 MySQL databases, and the use of a WYSIWYG online site building tool that lets you create up to 15 pages with no design software or special training in website design. Yes, PHP5, Perl, Python, and more than a couple of dozen free applications are included. Planning to run a WordPress blog? The app is already there waiting for you to use it.
Basic Linux hosting at $3.75 a month is the best deal for many small companies, independent professionals, bloggers and others. If your company or operation is much larger or you want to host sites for your design clients, you may want to move up to deluxe hosting at $6.75 a month for 50 domains or ultra hosting at $13.75 a month to host unlimited domains with unlimited storage and bandwidth. Windows hosting is also available a very reasonable prices if that better meets your needs.
Does all this inspire you to get started with eco-friendly hosting and have a tree planted for you? Any day is a good day, but Arbor Day is especially significant. Why not have a look at eco-friendly hosting programs from Dotster and see if they don’t make great sense for your business.
