Sunday, April 3, 2011

The memory of an elephant

In keeping with our beliefs regarding the sacredness of the Earth and her creatures, our Board of Directors today authorized the transfer of all of our domain and hosting accounts away from GoDaddy.com. The CEO of GoDaddy, Bob Parsons, recently posted a video showing him killing a wild elephant at a village in Zimbabwe.

While we are not going to attempt to debate the validity of hunting vs. non-hunting vs. sport hunting, we do note several things.

1. Elephants are still endangered in many parts of the world, including Zimbabwe, who until the regime of the current dictator Mugabe, had an active and successful conservation program which protected elephants and  brought thousands of tourists (and brought economic support for the villages via their money)  to view the herds in their natural habitat.

2. There exist many other ways to deter elephants from populated areas. According to a Zimbabwean wildlife expert, shootings like this do little to deter negative interaction between human settlements and the elephant population.

3. Elephants are intelligent, sensitive, intensely social and will grieve for their lost family members. Causing harm to such a creature in the name of sport is not something that we can continue to support financially.

As we are currently in the process of transferring our sites and domains, if you see  any weirdness with how our sites operate, or if it looks like they are down, please be patient with the transfer process, and check back in a day or so. This blog will not be affected by the changes, so go ahead and bookmark it to stay updated on the transfer status.

All of our domain registrations are being moved to Namecheap.com, who is currently offering a great deal to GoDaddy customers to transfer their domains. Additionally, they will donate $1 from every domain transfer fee to savetheelephants.org.

If you would like to transfer any of your sites / domains and need help with this process, GOOD.is has a great step-by-step tutorial on how to leave Godaddy.com.

Additionally, we voted to move our hosting accounts to www.iMountain.com which powers all of their servers with solar electricity, generated onsite at their location. So this decision was an easy one to make, and one that is in line with our stated intentions to support the sacredness inherent in all things.