Green Hosting Free Domain Name

A lot of people like the idea of helping the environment, but they like the idea of cheap hosting prices and free domain names even more. What if you didn’t have to choose? What if you could get an environmentally responsible hosting plan with the features you need at a bargain price with a free domain name included? Say hello to GreenGeeks green hosting with free domain name for life .

Just what do you get with this green web hosting? How about unlimited web space, unlimited bandwidth for data transfer, the ability to host unlimited domains on one account, unlimited email accounts and unlimited MySQL Databases.

Now let’s look at what’s free that other hosting providers nickel and dime you for. You domain name is free for as long as you are using the hosting service. It’s easy to move your existing site with free site migration. There are free marketing credits to help you boost your traffic and a free web site builder and templates to help you create a site from scratch in no time at all. You’ll have an auto-installer for 150+ free apps for all the functionality you need to compete in today’s marketplace.

All of this comes with a 99.9% uptime guarantee, no hidden costs, super fast activation, North American support anytime and a 30 day money back guarantee.

So, just how low is this low cost green hosting? Under five bucks a month. Actually, $4.95 a month. Cheap enough to get you interested? Wait no longer, get started right now.

You might think that at such a low price you’ll be getting some stripped down hosting service. Not so. GreenGeeks runs the Linux operating system with a high performance MySQL backend running on dual quad core frontend servers connected to the Internet by multi-gigabit bandwidth. The entire system is monitored 24/7, every 10 seconds. Courtesy nightly backups protect your data.

Well, that sounds like a good deal on hosting but what about the green aspects. Does this service really earn the title “green”?

GreenGeeks certain has earned its green stripes. A lot of companies buy energy credits to offset their power draw. Green Geeks goes them three times better. That’s right, they replace with wind power 3x the amount of power they draw from the grid to operate their web servers. That not only covers their carbon footprint, but the carbon footprints of two other companies that don’t care enough to contribute.

GreenGeeks goes beyond simply purchasing wind energy credits to claim green status. They’ve gone in an reconfigures their servers so that they use less energy and run cooler. That has the added benefit of reducing the cooling power needed to run the data centers. Office policy is to print only legal and essential documents and recycle any other paper used. Auto lighting control automatically turns off lights when the office is vacated. They even promote telecommuting and take turns bringing in home cooked meals to avoid all the paper, plastic and styrofoam that comes with take out orders.

GreenGeeks standard hosting plan will work for most everyone, but resellers and larger companies may need more resources. For that, they offer green reseller hosting and green VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting.

Are you intrigued enough to learn more about the details and features of GreenGeeks green web hosting ? Yes, it IS possible to be environmentally responsible and get the best deals on hosting at the same time.

A Bottomless Battery For Your Smartphone and Tablet

Mobile technology is the way we stay connected on the go. WiFi hotspots combined with 3G or 4G cellular give us bottomless connectivity. Now if we only had bottomless power to go along with it.

The bane of any technology not tethered to a wall outlet is the battery. Batteries are always going dead long before the day ends. It’s bad news when you are out in the field or at the restaurant table without the wall outlet. When the power in your device fades, it’s lights out. This is why heavy users have taken to toting an external battery to recharge their fading device or substitute for the internal battery. The only problem is that if you are out and about long enough you end up with two dead batteries instead of one.

What you really need is a battery that never runs out of power. Wait! Why, that’s perpetual motion! It’s technical heresy!

No, it’s clever engineering. What Solio has done is create a battery that recharges itself. It’s not perpetual motion because it does draw in energy. It’s just doesn’t suck it from a wall socket. The Solio Bolt gets its charge from the Sun.

When you think of solar energy, you’re probably imagining an acre of mirrors in the desert or a field of panels on the roof of the office. Those are solar power, alright. They’re what’s called large scale solar. There’s also such a thing as small scale solar. It’s been pretty much ignored up to now as a niche technology suitable only for applications that need power at any price. Emergency phones, remote monitoring, satellites, and so on have used small scale solar power for decades. What’s new is the mashup of solar cells, a high capacity lithium battery and control electronics that’s small enough to fit in your pocket, yet powerful enough to completely recharge your smartphone or tablet.

The enabling technologies are high efficiency solar cells and a 2,000 mAh Li-Poly battery. Battery technology has really advanced since the days when all you could get was nickel cadmium cells that couldn’t hold much of a charge and died long before your calculator did. These new lithium based cells can disappear in the palm of your hand yet pack 2 Ampere hours of juice. That’s a lot of juice, electrically speaking.

So, here’s how it works. Everything’s contained in the palm-size plastic package. You swing it open about its central axis to reveal two solar panels. There’s a hole at the axis that is just the right size for a pencil. Stick in a pencil so that the Solio will be propped up and facing the Sun. Then do something else like eat lunch or read a book. While Solio is basking, the battery is quietly charging. No line cords required.

We got one of these at home. When it’s not needed, it hangs by a cord in a window. A red LED in the back lights to indicate that the battery is charging on solar power. You can push a button at any time to get a reading of how much charge it’s gained. One flash means 10%, two flashes means 20% and so on. Yes, it takes all day to fully charge in sunlight, but what else is it doing? Just leave the Solio where it can see the Sun and it will top off before you know it. No having to remember to plug-in to charge that battery. The crew at Solio puts theirs on an outside window ledge. They get more sunlight than through a window. You can use that pencil that’s propping the unit up as a sundial to aim for best exposure. When there is no line showing, the alignment is optimal.

The Solio Bolt comes with a USB connector that you can plug your iPhone or iPad cable into to grab a charge. There’s even a special Apple mode that optimizes charging for Apple products. Everything else gets standard USB charging rates. If you need to recharge your Solio fast or it’s dark outside (night owls) you can recharge the battery through a USB wall charger or from a laptop. Non-eco friendly but effective.

You might think that something like this would really work well in the bush and you’d be right. In fact, it is so ideal for remote areas like rural Kenya, that Solio runs a solar leasing business there. Now households can have power for lights, radios and cell phone charging and avoid burning kerosene indoors at night. It will work just as well at your fishing cabin or wherever you pitch a tent.

Have you seen the light now? Would this solution meet your needs? Learn more and get your Solio Bolt quickly and easily. For a bottomless battery, it’s eminently affordable.

Every Home And Business Is A Battery

As part of Blog Action Day 2009, we’re dedicating this week’s posts to the topics of global warming, climate change and alternative energy. Yesterday’s installment presented the case that alternative energy is a fairy tale no more. It’s mature technology that only needs a little national fervor to make it the power of choice. It’s pretty hard to argue with the “shovel ready” nature of solar and wind when there is already so much installed base and even smaller scale units showing up for sale in hardware stores. But skeptics still cast a suspicious eye. Often that suspicion is voiced by the question, “So what do you do when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow?”

That’s a fair concern. After all, the sun still sets every evening and winds blow sporadically in most locations. If you don’t want your lights getting brighter and dimmer, you need something to smooth out the fluctuations. That something is energy storage.

Coal, nuclear and natural gas fired generating plants don’t need storage. The energy storage is built into the fuel. There is also a short-term energy reserve in the steam boilers that only heat up and cool down so fast. Not so with windmills and solar panels. They have no fuel. They extract energy that is directed at them and only while they have access to that energy source.

At first glance, this appears to be a show-stopper for alternative energy. But it’s really not that bad. The sun doesn’t shine at night, but most of us don’t either. When it gets dark, we go home and shut down offices, factories, schools and stores. The biggest energy demand is during the day. That’s also the biggest demand for air conditioning, because the same sun that makes it bright outside and lets solar panels tap it for electricity also heats everything up. The wind doesn’t blow all the time either, but it’s usually blowing somewhere. That’s the value of an energy grid. Sources that contribute energy feed the grid and users that need energy tap it.

Some of the difference between supply and demand can be handled by base load generators. These are things like nuclear power, geothermal, and natural gas generators that can produce at a steady rate regardless of what’s going on with the weather.

But really making good use of clean energy sources that may generate too much power some times and not enough at other times requires storage. Users that are so far “off the grid” that it’s too expensive to string wires to their cabins often use lead acid storage batteries. Wind and solar generators charge up the batteries when they can. The user draws power from the batteries as needed.

Batteries are a good idea, but the automobile style lead acid batteries have some limitations. You need a lot of them to store much energy, so they take up a lot of room. They emit nasty gasses that need to be vented. Battery life is also more limited than we would like.

Nickel-metal hydride batteries are more energy dense and are the battery of choice for today’s hybrid cars. Lithium ion batteries can store even more energy per cubic foot and are the batteries chosen for plug-in hybrids and electric cars. They’re a bit pricey when you get to the capacities needed to run a home or business, but that’s soon to change. As Li-ion batteries get into mass production in vehicle sizes, the prices will plummet. How soon before they’re reasonably priced for fixed location battery backup?

What I’m talking about is a unit about the size of a furnace that will have a battery, inverter and control circuitry suitable to run the entire electrical load of a residence or small business. Power outages will be a thing of the past. Feed one of these from solar panels on the roof or a wind generator out back and you can go off the grid any time you want and avoid paying the electric company for power. Or, better yet, let them pay you for power.

Rather than round up all the batteries and put them at the generating station, why not distribute both generation and storage of electrical power? The grid still makes sense for sharing power among users. Those who are power rich can sell their excess capacity. Those who have demanding needs, like steel mills, street lights, and buildings without generation or storage will just pay the electric bill like today. The difference is that most of the generating sources can be green. The system will be more robust because a million small resources aren’t as likely to go out of service at the same time as one or two large generators.

The availability of reasonably priced generation and storage may give rise to a new era of energy entrepreneurs. Savvy producers will want to sell as much as possible during the heavy-demand daylight hours to get the best price possible. At night, they could even draw off the grid at lower prices to run their own lights and recharge their batteries. How about the family energy farm? A field of windmills and solar roof panels augmented by fields of corn for ethanol between the wind generator towers may offer the kind of income that makes independent rural life really attractive again. Factories and warehouses with large flat roofs offer ready real estate to load up with angled solar panels to eliminate power bills and become a revenue source. Ever shrinking payback periods are making this type of investment more and more practical.

Alternative energy is a key piece in putting the brakes on climate change before our environment degenerates into something that we’ll really hate dealing with. If you share our interest in this important topic, you’ll be interested in the huge collection of articles being posted on blogs worldwide as part of Blog Action Day 2009: Climate Change. The official event is October 15, but we’re participating all week with articles on this subject. Come back tomorrow for our feature on banishing power vampires that suck your “juice.” Say, isn’t Halloween just around the corner?

Holy Guacamole, It's Green Hosting

The unlimited power sucking days of the Internet may be nearing an end. It's not just SUVs and old incandescent light bulbs that are sending polar bears to a watery grave. Every one of us who publishes a Web site or operates an online business contributes a little to the rising fever of Mother Earth. But what can we do about it short of pulling the plug on the very technology that puts food on our tables? What we need is a lean, green hosting machine.

Eco-hosting is a new idea that comes from the recognition that non-polluting electric power sources are in short supply, while our appetite for electricity is insatiable. Throwing another shovel full of coal on the fire isn't the answer it used to be. That's especially true now that we know that even scrubbing fossil fuel emissions of the uglier smog and acid rain pollutants still leaves the CO2 dilemma. While we might feel a little squeamish about plugging in another toasty server farm, lots of people are feeling so squeamish about global warming that bringing new power plants online is getting contentious. Hydro is pretty much all dammed up. Nukes are scary. What's left? I know. Alternative energy!

Wind and solar energy used to be laughable. But while everybody was yucking it up over the decades, the cost of both energy conversion technologies has been getting more and more competitive. Joke's over. You've got Google powering its Googleplex with solar panels and oilman T. Boone Pickens singing the praises of windmills in Texas. The alternative energy bandwagon is electrically powered and picking up steam... so to speak.

A company that's positioned itself out in front of the eco-parade is one with a really green name. I mean REALLY green. It's Good Avocado.

You read right. Good Avocado is the name of an eco-hosting company. No avocados come lately are they, either. This company has been offering eco-friendly hosting solutions for almost ten years. Now you might be wondering what makes a hosting company eco-friendly. In this case it's based on 100% carbon neutral operations "generated" by buying wind and solar offsets. Plus they plant a tree for every account they establish.

Green? Yes. But what makes them a good Web host avocado? This group is as smart as they are responsible. Their hosting technology is based on a cluster of servers called the AvocadoFarm that can ramp up with more traffic capacity to maintain consistent page load times and a 100% uptime guarantee. You know that the vast majority of web hosting companies wouldn't dare make such an offer, much less meet it.

You don't pay a premium for this hosting performance or the satisfaction of doing your part to support a better environment. Hosting packages and reseller accounts are competitively priced and come with lots of professional grade goodies like a brandable interface, Ruby on Rails, ability to host unlimited websites, and as many email accounts and MySQL databases as you can use. With 300 GB disk storage and 1,000 GB bandwidth you should be pretty well set no matter how big your business grows. Sound good, perhaps even great? Have a closer look and perhaps take a bite of Good Avocado Professional Hosting.

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.