Robbie Giles wrote:
I think the reasons for moving off of ROOTSWEB should be clearly
enunciated
before any change is made.
1. Is it an access issue? Is the current serve slow and/or unreliable?
No, they work very hard to maintain the quality and reliability at Rootsweb. In fact
there's the story of last winter's bad California storms. The power went out and
Brian
Leverich risked his life to drive down the mountain in an El Nino blizzard and get a
generator, then stayed up around the clock keeping it going. I would have rather seen the
sites down for a day or two than see him risk his life like that.
2. What does moving off of the server gain for the state program? Are the
server managers slow to respond, or unwilling to help in solving problems?
The county pages that I manage are not on ROOTSWEB. My server is very
reliable, so I never saw any advantage to moving onto ROOTSWEB. I am not
opposed to moving the state pages off of the ROOTSWEB server; but feel the
move should be proactive and not reactive. Frustration are very high on
all sides now, but let's think of the ID GenWeb project. What will best
serve the researchers visiting our state site?
I admit the timing of my question is reactive but there are other reasons. I have been
toying with the idea for several weeks. If I may paraphrase Jim Makovec, the USGenWeb
Project shouldn't have all its eggs in one basket. Last winter (was that only last
winter?) when
dsenter.com went down in a Nebraska snowstorm, many of the state pages were
housed there, but many were not. A mirror site at Rootsweb maintained the national
USGenWeb pages and the project continued.
Desenter.com was down for a couple of weeks and
most of the states moved to rootsweb. They went out of their way to create accounts as
quickly as possible.
But I wonder, what if California and that mountain they're on have an earthquake. What
if
Brian had died in that storm. All the national pages and all but about three states are
at rootsweb. Many counties are there as well. I'm not saying they shouldn't be,
just what
if.
The researchers would probably be confused. That has been the main thing stopping me and
one of the reasons I decided to get your input. Those who would come from the link on the
national page or from a county page would never know the difference. But the ones who
have a bookmark to the state wouldn't find it. If we move I'll leave a pointer to
the new
pages though.
As I was writing this another possibility occured to me. We could have the state pages at
two different locations at once. Identical sites. If anything happened to take either one
offline, we would be covered. Each county could link to the site of their choice or
provide a link to both just in case.
_-^-_-^-_-^-_-^-_-^-_-^-_-^-_-^-_-^-_-^-_-^-_-^-_
IDGenWeb County Coordinator for:
Bingham
http://www.geocities.com/heartland/plains/7614/bingham.htm
Bonneville
http://www.geocities.com/heartland/plains/7614/bonnev.htm
Jefferson
http://www.geocities.com/heartland/plains/7614/jeffers.htm
Madison
http://www.geocities.com/heartland/plains/7614/madison.htm
Fremont
http://www.geocities.com/heartland/plains/7614/fremont.htm
Find Idaho's USGenWeb site at
http://www.rootsweb.com/~idgenweb/