Eco Friendly Hosting $3.75/mo.

With Earth Day right around the corner, you might be wincing at the idea of paying a web host that uses electricity from a coal fired power plant to run the server that hosts your blog or website. Then, to add insult to injury, it draws more coal burning electricity to cool the server racks so the circuitry doesn’t melt down. Something just doesn’t feel right, especially if your mission involves being kind to the Earth and its residents.

No need to compromise your values when you can get eco-friendly hosting services for under $4 a month. Why, those inconsiderate global warmers probably charge more than that!

The service you are looking for is called Dotster. It’s a company with a catchy name and a great value in domains and web hosting services. Can you believe that basic web hosting is just $3.75 a month? Would you further believe that Dotster has an entire eco-friendly agenda? Let’s take a look at their green hosting program and then see how much you can get for so little money.

The reality of business is that not every location has room for those huge windmills that generate massive amounts of power at competitive rates. But, every business can buy their power from alternative energy sources if they wish. That’s what Dotster does. They purchase enough renewable energy credits to offset 150% of the energy it takes to run their hosting services. That’s half again as much as they’d need to just to claim green hosting. Those credits come from Bonneville Environmental Foundation (BEF) that restores watersheds, puts solar panels on schools and builds small scale solar and wind projects.

The model is that if you can’t generate or use power directly from wind or solar feeding your location, then pay to build those resources elsewhere so they can feed the grid and displace dirty generation facilities. If every business did this, we’d be awash in clean energy and be busy recycling fossil fuel generation equipment for other purposes.

Dotster goes beyond just paying for green power. They actively work to reduce the power they consume by upgrading their hosting infrastructure with high efficiency servers. That’s a double win because every kilowatt not used is a kilowatt that doesn’t need a generator at all. On top of every thing else, Dotster will plant a tree for you when you buy a hosting package. Those trees come from Trees for the Future, which as a 2012 action plan to plant over 17 million trees. Yours could be one of them!

Now, let’s see what this incredibly affordable hosting service really gives you for your $3.75 a month. First of all, you get Linux hosting, the industry standard, with 10 GB of website disk space and 300 GB of bandwidth. There are few websites, indeed, that can blow through that much storage and bandwidth for a single domain. That’s what this plan is tailored for. It’s for hosting one domain, be it a website, blog, or some combination of the two. Note that you can have unlimited subdomains if you wish to subdivide your domain into smaller units.

You also get 100 email accounts, 5 FTP logins, 10 MySQL Databases, and a SiteBuilder that lets you easily create a website with up to 15 pages using your only your web browser. Yes, the server runs PHP5 and Perl/Python, with free applications that include WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, PHPMyChat, Classifieds, Post-Nuke, TikiWiki and a bunch of others.

As of this writing, Dotster is also offering a free domain name for a year with any of the hosting plans. Look for the grey offer box on the Linux Hosting or Windows Hosting pages. Windows hosting? Yes, you can also get Windows hosting for a little more money ($4.75 a month) if that’s what you would prefer. Both Linux and Windows hosting are available with larger resources that scale to unlimited bandwidth and unlimited disk space if you really need that much.

Is there any reason to go with some smoke belching legacy hosting service when you can get eco-friendly webhosting that you can be proud of at such a great price? Well, what are you waiting for? Learn more and get your eco friendly hosting for $3.75 a month right now. You can lock in for 1, 2 or 3 years to know in advance how much your hosting budget will be down the road.

Dotster Eco-Friendly Hosting Commitment

Anyone doing business on the Internet in the last 10 years has heard of Dotster, and the Dotster family of companies including Domain.com. When you think of Dotster, you probably think of domain name registration services. Dotster is also a hosting company offering everything from basic email hosing service for under a dollar a month all the way up to enterprise level website hosting. What I’ll bet you didn’t know is that Dotster is a major player in the realm of eco-friendly hosting.


Eco-Friendly or “green” hosting is growing in popularity among individuals and organizations that want to contribute to a better environment. The conventional wisdom is that green means more expensive when the term is applied to just about anything. That’s not true anymore. You can have Dotster eco-friendly hosting for just $5.75 a month with no long term commitment. Sign up for longer term plans and it gets even cheaper.

Dotster has a multifaceted approach to their eco-friendly hosting initiative. It starts with buying wind energy to power their web hosting servers. What they do is purchase enough renewable energy credits to offset all the power used for their hosting and even more. The commitment is 150% renewable energy offset for all Dotster web hosting servers.

Dotster buys its renewable energy credits from the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, a Portland, Oregon-based nonprofit organization. The revenues they receive from selling their BEF carbon offsets or renewable energy credits is used to support building new renewable energy projects that include solar, wind and biomass power sources. Socially responsible companies and individuals can both buy these energy credits from various organizations nationwide who fund sustainable energy projects.

Substituting wind energy for coal, natural gas or even nuclear power is a good idea. An even better idea is to find ways to use less energy to get the same job done. Dotster does this by constantly upgrading their hosting infrastructure to improve both reliability and energy efficiency. They buy less power, which reduces the amount they have to charge their customers. Less power means less demand from the grid, so that those new wind generators can handle other loads and further reduce the need for carbon-based energy sources.

This attitude of ecologically responsible behavior is infused throughout the Dotster corporate culture. They donate their used computer equipment to programs for recycling and technology education for the disadvantaged rather than dumping it in a landfill to slowly leach out toxic substances. The office staff is encouraged to reduce printing, use paperless billing, recycle batteries and ditch paper cups in favor of Dotster reusable bottles.

As the icing on the cake, Dotster will plant a tree for you when you become a new Dotster web hosting company. The trees come from Trees for the Future, an organization dedicated to sustainable agroforestry that has already planted 50 million trees worldwide.

If you are on the lookout for web hosting that is more in tune with your personal philosophy as well as reliable, feature rich and an excellent deal, take a closer look at Dotster.com Web Hosting and Domain Name Registration services.

Earth Day Means Money For Electronics Recycling

It’s Earth Day, the day to hug those trees and generally show appreciation for Mother Nature. We better show a little respect for Momma Earth, before she decides that we’re the ones who ought to be recycled. Even so, can’t we find some way to make a buck off all this environmental goodness?

You bet we can. I’ll bet even Ed Begley, Jr. wouldn’t be too horrified at the idea of pocketing a few dollars from doing a good thing for the ecology. I’m certainly not above it. How about yourself? Would you like to do a little painless recycling and put a few bucks in your pocket for the effort?

I thought so. Well, here’s the deal. We’re a world swimming in a sea of unwanted electronics. Grandpa would be horrified at the thought of setting his Atwater Kent out at the curb for trash pickup. But thanks to automation and mass marketing, electronics is now a throw away commodity -- literally.

Think about it. Where is the cell phone you had before the one you have now? How about the one before that. We’re probably talking less than six years for three generations of cell phone design, and this has been going on for a couple of decades. So, is it in a desk drawer? Or was it dumped unceremoniously in the trash during last spring’s cleaning frenzy?

This is typical of not only cell phones, but digital cameras, MP3 players, gaming consoles, home audio equipment and computers of all types. Would you be shocked to learn that the “junk” electronics you set out at the curb last Sunday night could have taken you to a nice dinner and a movie, or financed the next electronic gadget on your wish list?

It’s true, and if you’re suspicious that this just can’t be so, find out how much cash you can get for your electronics now.

Oh, you think that running ads and trying to sell that stuff is more trouble than it’s worth. That’s probably true. But you don’t have to run any ads or wait for people to come to the door and then try and talk you into a lower price. There’s no need to go through that grief when you can just check electronics recycling prices online in a minute or so. If you like the price this recycler is offering, then click to order a free shipping box. Drop your stuff in the mail and back comes a check. Does it get any sweeter than this?

So, where’s the Earth Day tie-in to this blatantly capitalistic activity? It comes from keeping electronics out of the landfills here and abroad. This equipment may look benign, but left out in the environment it starts to decompose and leach out all sorts of toxic materials. The legacy of trashing your iStuff is iPoisoning for some future generation. You don’t want to be responsible for that, do you? Of course not. So even if your old unwanted electronics proves worthless, send it in for proper recycling anyway. Your Mother Earth will appreciate it.

Going Green Office Tips

Happy Earth Day!

While we celebrate the environment today, any day is a good day to reduce waste and improve energy efficiency. It's not just the right thing to do, it's good for business. Let's start by finding some simple changes to make. We'll check the results and move on from there.

My own small office was almost insufferably hot during the summer and quite toasty even in Northern Illinois winters. Checking around, I could feel that a couple of computers, monitor, TV set, printers and overhead & desk lights were pumping out the BTUs like little space heaters.

The first change was to replace the 4 incandescent mini-flood lights overhead with equivalent CFLs or Compact Fluorescent Lights. These have come a long way in a few years. They only cost a few dollars now, are available in a wide variety of styles at the big box hardware stores, come in light temperatures that mimic incandescent, use dramatically less power, and are barely warm to the touch. The 4 dimmable Neptun R20 reflector bulbs I'm currently using consume 16 watts each versus 50 watts each for incandescent. That's 64 watts total versus 200 at full brightness. It's also 24 watts in heat versus 160 watts lost as heat per specs on the package. That change alone makes a huge difference in the heat you feel beating down on your head from above.

The two desk lamps are OTT-LITE fluorescents with full spectrum bulbs that make reading documents and working on the computer easy. As with the overhead reflectors, you can barely feel any heat when you put your hand near the bulb. You can feel incandescents, and worse yet halogens, from feet away.

Another change I made was to replace my tube TV with a similar size flat screen model. I could feel heat pouring out of the bookcase that held the old TV. Not any more.

My new color laser printer, a Brother HL-4070CDW, has an Energy Star sticker. That means it complies with energy standards for that type of equipment. Mostly, it sits quietly and uses little energy on standby. I intend to buy Energy Star rated equipment from now on. More and more manufacturers are complying, so it's getting easier to find. Computers and monitors are big users of power. I switched from a 17" tube monitor that was a noticeable heat generator to a 19" ViewSonic flat screen that is barely warm to the touch.

Want to know the best way to cut back on both heat and electricity? Turn things off when you aren't using them. That even means switching off the lights when you leave the room. It may seem trivial, but over the course of a month or year you can save many kilowatt hours by getting into this simple habit. Also set your monitor to go dark after 10 or 20 minutes and let your PC put itself to sleep if you don't use it for 15 to 30 minutes. It will wake up quickly enough when you need it again. If you find this too annoying to your work flow, just set the times longer. It will still make a difference when you go out for lunch or are in meetings for hours on end.

A handy tool that shows you instant results is the P3 International P4400 Kill A Watt Electricity Usage Monitor. They're available at hardware stores and online for about $25. You plug in the device you want to measure and plug the meter into the wall socket. It shows you the number of watts being consumed. If you let it run for a day, you'll get the number of KWH used per day. At 10 cents or more per KWH, the total cost of running electronic equipment is significant. Even the phantom power consumed by equipment on standby adds up when everything on the circuit is considered. Consider using a surge protected power strip with a mechanical switch to completely turn off equipment that is only infrequently used.

Can you really see the difference? You bet you can. We replaced almost every incandescent light in the house with a similarly lumen rated CFL. The change paid for itself in a matter of a few months. I was shocked by how much of a difference it made.

On the waste side, I've switched to Office Depot 100% recycled EnviroCopy paper. This product has also come a long way. It's just as bright and solid as the non-recycled paper and doesn't cost that much more by the carton. But the best way to solve the trash problem is just don't use so much. I've pretty much canceled my paper trade magazines in favor of online electronic delivery. It not only saves the wasteful cycle of printing, mailing and hauling to the street for recycling, but it's actually easier to scan for the stories you are interested in.

Another tool that is gaining favor for both cost reduction and "greener" business practice is the online meeting, versus travel for in-person get togethers. You can still do that occasionally for relationship building. For day to day needs a tool such as GoToMeeting can save a small fortune when collaborating on projects.

I know that these measures just scratch the surface, but its easy to start by taking simple steps immediately. You'll be surprised by how much of a difference you'll actually notice.

Get Paid To Celebrate National Cell Phone Recycling Week

Did you know that we're right in the middle of National Cell Phone Recycling Week? Did you further know that there's a way you can get paid to join the celebration? You didn't? Well, then there's no time to waste. Pay close attention.

National Cell Phone Recycling Week is an initiative of the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA, to raise awareness that cell phones are chock full of valuable materials that can be recycled and toxic substances that need to be kept out of the environment.

As a public service, the wireless carriers and a number of retailers are collecting your old decrepit cell phones so that they can be properly dismantled, separated by type of material, and recycled to make new cell phones and other things. Now if you have one or more of those old critters hiding in the bottom of a desk drawer or in a junk box in the garage, you know the right thing to do is your civic duty by dropping off that phone at a collection point. For very little effort on your part, you'll be preventing generations of environmental damage that occur when electronic products decompose in the environment.

What you probably don't know, but might suspect, is that many cell phones and other devices, such as GPS systems, digital cameras, MP3 players, satellite radios, laptop computers, camcorders and gaming consoles are still very much functional. Seems a shame to send them to the crusher just because you've traded up for a newer model. You'll really think that's inappropriate once you find out that you can get paid to send in your old electronics.

This is the little secret on how to get paid to celebrate the environment this month and every month. You don't have to worry about running ads or auctions or any of that. You simply look up what your cell phone or other electronic device is worth, request a free postage paid shipping box, and spend next to no time packing it up and sending it in. That's it. You'll get your check shortly thereafter.

Actually, selling your unwanted electronics for reuse is even more green than recycling the materials. By passing this device on to those who can still use it, you are avoiding the need to spend energy manufacturing yet another product to replace one that is being disposed. When that device is finally used up and no longer functional, then it's time to grind it up to make new ones.

I should mention that another good deed you can do is to donate your working product or the proceeds you get from your sale to a charitable organization. In these economic times, there's an almost overwhelming need for social support services of all kinds. You may find an organization nearby that you want to help. Otherwise, you can choose to take the cash or donate it to charity when you sell your cell phone or electronic device of value.

Save the Cell Phone, Save the World

What toxic waste that you don't think about is piling up in our landfills? What source of gold is being tossed in the trash? What is it that people throw away that they could exchange for money?

Give up? It's cell phones. Cell phones are an environmental threat, a potential source of valuable minerals, and a marketable commodity all in one. Let's have a look at this underestimated resource and see what we've been missing.

A cell phone doesn't seem like much. It fits in the palm of your hand or tucks neatly into a pocket or purse. In its plastic or metal case a cell phone certainly seems chemically inert. Nothing leaks out and it doesn't stain your hand. So what's so toxic about a mobile telephone?

While in service or even left for decades in a desk drawer, a cell phone won't be damaging the environment. The problem is more subtle than that. The magic that gives a palm sized communicator the power to reach around the world lies in the materials and processing that create the electronic circuitry. These things aren't made out of renewable pine trees. They're made with lead, cadmium, arsenic and mercury. They also have their share of plastic and glass. Toxic metals can leach out of the circuit boards and batteries once the phones are attacked by water and various liquid chemicals that also find their way into landfills. On day one an obsolete phone is just buried there with the kitchen wastes, old shoes and industrial refuse. On day 1,000 or day 10,000 nasty processes are at work, dissolving captive chemicals and adding them to a slurry of toxins that will work their way into the water table, if they can.

One cell phone will destroy the Earth? Of course not. The one tossed here and the one tossed there represent a minuscule problem. It's when they are joined by hundreds and hundreds of millions of their ilk that the problem grows too big to ignore. The thing that's unique about cell phones is that they are on a 2 or 3 year cycle. People sign up for cellular service, activate their spanking new wireless device, and proceed to glue it to their ear for the duration of their contract. Some people just keep using their phone past the contract date. But most can't wait to get either a new model phone or a different carrier, who will also insist on a new phone. Since the phones are subsidized by the carriers in order to hold onto customers for a least a year or two, the cost to the consumer is low. So what do they care if they toss the old phone and get a new one free or at a small cost?

It is estimated that 11 million otherwise working cell phones are retired every month. Some are immediately dropped into the dumpster, but many more are simply slipped into a desk drawer or box in the basement. You might not want to keep using the old mobile, but it seems too good to just throw away. So an estimated 500 million of them are sitting in distributed landfills, otherwise known as people's homes, right now. Some day, maybe on moving day, one family member is going to decide that this unwanted device will never be used again and should go in the trash along with broken toys, worn out jeans, and everything that wouldn't sell at the last yard sale. Some day all 500 million and probably many times that number of cell phones will be slowly decaying in our public landfills and private dumping grounds.

What makes this situation even sadder is that those same consumers could have mailed their unwanted phone to a recycler at no cost. The recycler disassembles the phone, recovers plastics and metals for reuse in other applications, and sends nothing to the landfill. That's right, nothing. Who pays for all this work? The value of the materials in the phone are enough to cover the costs of recycling. What might seem like worthless materials are actually in demand. That includes minute amounts of gold used in chip and circuit board manufacturing. A little gold plating here and there and you're talking a mine's worth of the stuff spread over millions and millions of phones.

Many cell phones don't even have to meet the crusher so soon in their young lives. Recent model cellular phones are quite salable in bulk to third world countries clamoring for affordable technology. Many can also be repurposed as emergency phones for people living in shelters. Some can be refurbished as offered as pre-paid phones. All of these possibilities mean that the phone you were going to toss in the trash might be a $10, $20 or $100 bill in disguise. If you took a few minutes to order a pre-paid mailer and sent your usable but unwanted surplus cell phone in for evaluation, you could be getting a check in the mail instead of a guilty feeling from contributing to the waste problem.

Do you have one or more old cell phones hanging around your house awaiting their demise? See how much your cell phone model(s) are worth and then send them in for recycling or reuse. You'll feel good and might wind up with some unexpected cash in your pocket.

Why Alternative Energy Makes Sense for Technology Companies

Energy and information. They are inexorably linked in our virtualized business world. In fact, our ability to provide enough energy may be the undoing of the cyber world as surely as the byproducts of energy production may be the undoing of our modern physical world. Think global warming has nothing to do with Business 2.0? Think again.

We tend to think of energy limitations and dirty, smelly, messy, polluting energy sources as legacies of the industrial age. Now that we have entered the information age, the seamy side of business and consumer life should be abating. This should be especially true in the online world. It seems so pristine and post-industrial. Just click open your browser and you have instant transportation to anywhere in the world to communicate, observe and transact business. How can a world of belching smokestacks and filthy rivers be in any way related to this?

Our online world is a world of illusion. It's not just virtual spaces that are created as alternate universes. It's everything. We think in terms of PCs, wireless access points, fiber optic strands stretching around the world with occasional routers directing traffic, and Web servers somewhere out there. In the privacy of our offices, or while immersed in notebook computers on restaurant table tops, it all seems so highly efficient and low energy. Efficient? Perhaps in the organizational sense. Low energy? Not a chance.

In order for us to visit a museum in Paris or get stock quotes from New York using nothing but battery power, Gigawatts are being expended on our behalf. The WiFi hot spot we're connected to needs at least a few watts to transmit and receive. It is fed by a router that uses more electricity. All those routers, and there are many, between source and destination are each sucking fractional kilowatts from the grid. At the far end, a Web server or server farm processes our request and responds with the data files we're seeking. Ever catch a chill in a server room? Probably not unless you've had a power failure in January.

But that's just a part of the picture. There are more servers. Lots and lots of servers that help us find what we're looking for in the first place. Google is a multi-Megawatt power sink, with most of it being lost to heat rejection. All that heat needs an equally powerful cooling system to ensure that the waste BTUs are ejected from the building before they melt the processors.

Add to this the industrial world of manufacturing that actually makes all those computers, servers, displays and batteries, and you've got a huge energy requirement for technology that seems low energy when you only look at one piece of the system at a time. Where does all that energy come from? Belching smokestacks mostly. Perhaps not so visibly belching smoke these days. The EPA has done a good job in cleaning up the smelly and acidic atmospheric emissions. The Cuyahoga River hasn't caught fire in decades. In fact, most of our waterways look pretty clean at a glance. But we're still burning coal and most of our electronic waste is still being tossed in landfills for future generations to deal with.

The majority of us don't come home from work with grimy faces anymore, so we don't feel dirty. The pollution we're creating is more insidious. Carbon Dioxide is replacing smog as the instrument of our demise, if we choose to simply ignore it and continue as-is. A few decades from now we might just be asking why it's so hot outside the server room.

What we want from business today is speed. We want instant transactions, instant access to the World's library of everything ever written, and high definition video downloaded as fast as possible. That speed comes at the price of power. Power itself comes at a price, and it's going up. Nuclear power was first promoted as too cheap to meter. Now we're wondering if we can afford to build any more reactors and deal with their radioactive waste products. Fusion power was 50 years away fifty years ago. It still is. There's still coal, oil and natural gas, at least for awhile. Sequestering their carbon emissions may prove so expensive we'll quickly become energy limited or take our chances on a toasty future.

Another approach is to face the music and begin generating the increasing levels of power we need from non-polluting resources. This should be a national and worldwide agenda, but companies can go ahead and get control of their power supplies before the politicians stop bickering. The best prospects are wind, water and solar. The best of these for most companies is solar. That nice big flat roof on your building is perfect for a solar panel farm. By connecting it to the grid, you don't have to worry about local energy storage and your peak power production will be during the mid-day, which is normally the time of peak power consumption. Google has "seen the light" already and is installing solar panels at their facility in Mountain View, California.

Colocation facilities seem like a natural match for alternative energy sources of all types. They are electricity intensive, already have backup batteries and inverters to deal with momentary grid interruptions, and require diesel generators to pick up the load during catastrophic power failures. But site such a facility near a hydro dam, especially a private one, or with enough land to support windmills, plus the solar arrays, and a colo might become energy independent. Perhaps even to the point of not needing diesel backup at all.

Far from being independent of the limitations of industrial age power sources and their environmental effects, higher technology companies are exacerbating the problem. We'll have to start thinking in terms of contributing to the energy demands of the coming decades if we don't want to find ourselves stifled by limited power availability or damaging the world we want to live in.