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.

Food Security Atlas

Area of distribution and damage of the European Wheat Stem Sawfly, Cephus pygmaeus L.

“Here is Holly's environmental map pick for this week.  It is an interactive website with the goal of promoting world food security that provides information and maps for the geographic distributions of 100 crops, 640 species of crop diseases and pests, and 560 wild crop relatives for the area of Russia and neighboring countries, as well as downloadable GIS data.  Funding for this project, supported by such agencies as USDA, provided GIS training for scientists and students from former Soviet states.”  Thanks for sending, Holly Porter-Morgan!

Here is the url : http://www.agroatlas.ru/en/about/

Interactive Agricultural Ecological Atlas of Russia and Neighboring Countries

To get to the maps, you have to pick one of the crops, pests, or diseases (lovely!) on the left side of the page, and then go to the page for it and then click on the link for the map from that page.  (It seems that the link to the maps are kind of buried beneath the photos of the crop/pest/disease, which says “Object Map”). It would be nice if they had done an interactive map, but they do have downloadable spatial files though, which is great for anyone doing research on any of these topics.

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.