Save Elephants By Transferring Your Domain Names

By John Shepler

Here’s a short term opportunity for you to save considerably on what you pay for your domain names and help a worthy cause at the same time.

Namecheap, a well known domain and hosting company that we use for our own domains, is running a special offer still available today (August 15, 2014). When you transfer your .com, .net or .org domain to Namecheap, you pay just $7.88 for the first year and use the promo code SAVEDUMBO. That’s a great bargain compared to most hosting companies.

What about after the first year? I just renewed one of my important commercial .com domains for $10.69. That’s a good price on its own. $7.88 is a steal.

So, what’s this good deed? In addition to the price break you receive, Namecheap will send $1 to Save the Elephants for each transfer.

Save the Elephants is an important organization working to secure a future for elephants on the African continent. At least 33,000 elephants are being illegally killed each year for their ivory. At this rate, they may well go extinct within our lifetime.

Is that something you want to let happen? I didn’t think so. Learn more about the work that Save the Elephants is doing to thwart poaching and trafficking in ivory and to raise awareness of this dire situation. If you are moved by this important cause, please consider making a donation of your own to Save the Elephants or some of the other important organizations working to “help an elephant.”

Don’t forget, the Namecheap special transfer offer is good today only, although you can get an excellent price on hosting and domain registrations all year long.

Update: With your help, NameCheap donated $1,256 to Save The Elephants in honor of this year's World Elephant Day. Thank you.

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.