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.

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?

The Green Energy Fairy Tale is Real

How many decades have we been treated to a magical fairy tale of the future, where fantastic power sources like solar, wind, tidal, wave motion and maybe fusion will create a second Eden for us? It would be a world where unlimited energy provides a picture-perfect environment. Oh, but that’s not for now. Today we need wallow in the dirty world of coal and oil because those technologies are all that are practical with the technology we have at hand.

Every time I hear that, I have to look around to see if we are all dressed like characters in a Dickens novel. Are you kidding, Scrooge? We could rid ourselves of dirty energy right now... if we wanted to.

The problem is that we are living in a fog of our own making. I’m not talking about the haze that settles over Los Angeles and other major cities around the world due to air pollution. I’m talking about a mental fog that we can’t see our way clear of. Like many myths, it’s so ingrained and potent that we believe it with all our hearts and souls. The problem is that it’s just plain wrong.

Remember the Apollo Moon program? I do. As a kid, I liked to watch the rockets blow up every time they tried to launch one in the late 50’s and early 60’s. Then President Kennedy said we were going to the Moon and come back safely within the decade. So, we did.

Clean energy is a far more mature technology today than rocketry was in my youth. Everything you need to power your home or business from solar or wind energy is an off-the-shelf item with a manufacturer’s warranty. Hybrid cars with double the MPG ratings of their non-hybird equivalents are sitting in show rooms, shined up and ready to drive off the lot.

Oh, but those are just toys for people who are willing to pay through the nose to be early adopters. Aren’t they? No, Scrooge, this stuff is mainstream now. In nearly all locations there is enough sunlight that you can make your electric meter run backwards with just the spread of solar panels that will cover the roof of your house. I just saw a wind generator on sale at one of the big box hardware stores. My Camry Hybrid routinely gets twice the milage of my previous Olds Cutlass Supreme and offers the same power and even more cabin room.

What’s wrong here is that there is no national fervor yet for energy independence nor slowing climate change. If there was, what would it look like? Let’s try to see an alternative dream.

This is a dream where every home has a roof made of solar panels and an inverter connected to the power grid. You don’t buy electricity any more, you sell it. Your electric bill is zero. Every flat roof of a commercial, government, school, or hospital building is also beset with solar panels. They’re often hard to see from the ground, but from the air it’s one great sea of power panels. Out in the country, every farm has at least one windmill that provides a secure income for the farm families regardless of what crop prices are doing. A barn roof full of solar panels adds to that residual income and powers the farm.

This mass adoption on on-site power generation means those dirty coal plants can just be shut down or converted to natural gas peaker plants that run only as needed to supplement the green energy sources. Nuclear plants provide a reliable base load capability with no realistic threat of poisoning the public. Our one domestic close call was the Three Mile Island accident 30 years ago where nobody was hurt. But it spooked us so badly that we’ve shunned nukes ever since. About 40,000 people are killed in traffic accidents per year or about 1,200,000 dead in the 30 years since Three Mile Island and yet there’s no outcry to shun cars. See how powerful these mental fogs are?

The President and other world leaders are seriously considering another round of nuclear weapons reductions. So do we just chop those warheads up and hide the radioactive parts inside a mountain in Nevada? No way. There’s our bridge fuel to make the switch from dirty to clean energy. When we’ve transitioned, we can reprocess the rods until they are nearly non-radioactive and stow what’s left for future generations to learn how to harness.

We use about 9 million barrels per day of oil for gasoline. If we simply doubled the mileage of our vehicles by switching to those hybrids that are ready to go, we could cut that to 4.5 million, which is less than the 5 million barrels per day that we produce in the U.S. That’s energy security, plus we’d cut the greenhouse gas contribution from cars in half. The next generation of plug-in hybrids and electric cars will use even less in the way of liquid hydrocarbon fuels and will create only a pittance of greenhouse gasses if we are smart enough to generate the electricity from sunlight, wind, and nuclear.

That’s not all of the oil we use, but by what insanity are we still burning oil other than for transportation? A crash program to convert all oil fueled generating stations to natural gas and switch the Northeastern U.S. from heating oil to natural gas and/or electric would get rid of the need to scratch around for new oil wells and dramatically cut greenhouse emissions. This conversion project would be a good use for current and future national infrastructure investments. We’re talking a jobs program at a time of record unemployment, an efficiency improvement that will save business and residential users money on their heating bills, and a major reduction in pollution and global warming emissions.

So, do we put on our Victorian attire and pretend we’re still living in the 19th century or do we cut through the fog that’s holding us back and demand to make alternative energy our next national passion? If we pursued green energy with the fervor that got us to the moon, we could simultaneously solve our job creation, global warming, economic security, and energy production problems. The whole new can-do 21st century attitude we’d acquire would be a bonus.

Do you think that as a nation we could be doing a much better job of converting to new energy resources to stem the accelerating rate of climate change that is upon us? If so, you’ll find many more inspiring posts to read on Blog Action Day 2009 - Climate Change on Thursday, October 15. Visit www.blogactionday.org for suggestions on how you, too, can participate.

At T1 Rex's Business Telecom Explainer, we’re blogging on the subject of climate change the entire week. You may also enjoy reading our kick-off post, “Blog Action Day For A Less Toasty Tomorrow.”

Blog Action Day For A Less Toasty Tomorrow

Hey, you in the server room. Is it hot enough for you? No? Well, just wait until tomorrow.

Global warming is upon us. All the dire warnings from Al Gore, the reports you hear on TV and read in magazines and newspapers, and everything on the blogosphere isn’t really about heading off some future climate change. It’s a hope and a plea that we can keep it from becoming catastrophic.

Make no mistake about it, things are heating up. Not just the discussion, mind you. It’s actually getting warmer outside. As a resident of that rustbelt tundra known as the Midwest, I know that’s a hard concept to buy when your toes get frostbit just running for the mail in mid-January. This last winter in Northern Illinois was a cruel and bitter joke after a couple decades of frequent El Nino moderation. The summer has also been more temperate than any in recent memory. But look at what’s happening in the Arctic Ocean. Shipping companies are downright giddy about that pesky sea ice disappearing to reveal a shortcut for hauling containers of “stuff” between trading nations. The Russians made a big production out of planting their flag from a submarine below the North Pole. Nobody wanted that forsaken wasteland before the lucky confluence of massive oil reserve discoveries and rising sea temperatures. They are now anxiously awaiting the day when Santa’s workshop sinks like the Titanic, clearing the area so that drilling projects can proceed unimpeded.

Like flying in a cloud bank, your senses are inferior to instruments in knowing which way is up, or whether global warming is real when your eyeglasses are frosting over. Perhaps this is why the term climate change is easier to swallow. One’s intuition tells you that something strange is going on when California is burning to the ground and polar bears are taking over the sport of synchronized swimming. What’s it going to feel like when Bedouins relocate to Iowa because that’s where the sand is?

If we really are going to hell in a CO2 handbasket, though, where is the panic? You don’t see middle-age men stapling thermometers to fishing hats and screaming their lungs out at town hall meetings. There are no organized “ice baggers” with their Isn’t Cool Enough movement demanding that the government lower temperatures. How come there’s no Hot News Channel with multimillionaire cheerleaders riling up public emotions?

That day is coming. Right now climate-everything is on the back burner as we’re preoccupied with punching each other in the face over government versus insurance company death panels and which failed bankers deserve the biggest of the billion dollar bonuses. Eventually, all this will pass and someone will pipe up, “Hey, how ‘bout that climate change?”

But why wait for the deck to clear before we start dealing with the inevitable? Not everyone is prepared to hold indefinitely for the Gosselins to reconcile and clear some column inches and television news segments so that there’s room for a serious discussion on how we can ameliorate a thermal meltdown. Blog Action Day 2009 on October 15 is perhaps the kickoff event that nudges the focus of public discussion toward the universal challenge that is climate change.

What is Blog Action Day? It’s a coordinated effort to engage the power of new media to “change the global conversation.” The idea is that bloggers worldwide join forces on one day of the year to all write on a particular topic of global importance. Blog Action Day 2009 is dedicated to the subject of climate change. Thousands of blogs, including at least 11 of the world’s top 100 blogs, will all be presenting thoughtful posts related to emerging technology, health issues, poverty and conflict, eco-friendly consumerism, financing, government policy and sustainable design, among other topics. The focus of each participating blog will related to the subject of climate change on that particular day, which happens to be this coming Thursday, the 15th.

As you might have guessed by now, T1 Rex’s Business Telecom Explainer is participating in Blog Action Day and will be presenting a special article on banishing power vampires as the October 15 post. But I’ve decided that this initiative really deserves more than a single day’s effort. So every post this week will be in some way related to climate change and our focus of technology. I hope that you enjoy these articles and will participate in the discussion with your considered comments.

If you also write a blog, will you join us in this special project? Your voice is both welcome and needed. You can participate by registering your blog for free at the web site for Blog Action Day 2009: Climate Change. While you are there, pick up a badge for your blog, like the one shown on this post. Leave a comment here with a link to your Thursday post, as I’d love to read what fellow bloggers have to say on this important and timely issue.

Samsung Reclaim is Green and Free

Who says that going green will cost you a bundle? Not with this eco-friendly cell phone. It's the Samsung Reclaim M560 for Sprint. This is hot technology in a cool green wrapper.

The Samsung Reclaim is a capable messaging phone, configured as a slider with a full QWERTY keyboard. The color display measures 2.6 inches or 320 x 240 pixels and is capable of displaying over 262,000 colors. That melds nicely with the 2.0 Megapixel digital camera that takes pictures good enough to print and share. The camera also works as a camcorder to record sharable video clips.

The Reclaim offers fast 3G connectivity, where available, on Sprint’s PCS voice and data network so you can enjoy Sprint TV, the Sprint Music Store, Sprint Video and other streaming media. There is integrated aGPS support for Sprint Navigation that gives you turn by turn directions.

Messaging? You bet. This phone is ready for instant messaging, text messaging, Email that supports Microsoft Exchange (Outlook), multimedia picture and video messaging and even Web browsing.

Music? Of course. The built-in MP3 player lets you carry your tunes anywhere. Get more storage with an optional microSD memory card up to 32 GB. You can even wirelessly stream music to stereo Bluetooth enabled headsets.

So far this sounds like any of the latest high technology cell phones. So what’s the green angle?

The Samsung Reclaim is what its name implies. This phone was designed with recyclable bio-plastic materials created from plants. Both the phone and its charger meet Greenpeace International standards. There’s also a Sprint One Click Green Tile that provides you with daily green tips, strategies for sustainable living, a green glossary and more.

Just to go over the top, Sprint will donate $2 to the Nature Conservancy’s Adopt-an-Acre program that protects important and imperiled natural places around the world. so far Adopt-an-Acre has raised $22 million to protect 600,000 acres in South America, Asia, Central America, the Caribbean and Africa.

Oh, and did you happen to notice... It’s GREEN! (It’s also available in Ocean Blue)

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