Think about it for a minute from a business point of view USGW was a big
draw for rootsweb/ancestry as long as the National site and State sites
were still there, but the exodus a few years back left them with thousands
of broken links which have never been fixed . They are running ron long
redundant, slow servers with ancient programing which requires endless
maintenance. They are purchasing new servers, which are not cheap, even if
you go low dough.
If they are smart, they have run financial analyses to determine if free
webspace is a loss leader or just a loss, or does it break even or produce
a al profit.. I know if it were my company I would.
To be perfectly honest, I am surprised they have not started charging for
webspace. You have to remembethat
Ancestry.com is owned by Wall Street
Investment Bankers, not genealogists, iIf it is not producing a profit, it
will be sold off ,discontinued! or totally revamped into something that is
a non genealogists idea of a genealogy ! Look hey did with
genealogy.com
and
myfamily.com. Both were great from a genealogy searchers position
however not from a profit and loss outlook.The forums at genforum contained
so valuable information that basically has been rendered unusable. lots of
websites with great info has been lost unless we can perchance find them
via the wayback machine.
That's just my on things looking at it from a purely business stand point.
it, it has been great to have that free space for 20 years, that is
generous beyond belief but times are different now,fewer people are using
their paid services due to many people being out of work, having to take
a lower paying job just to make ends meet when the cushy job with the good
salary and benefits went to India Mexico or wherever.
Laverne Tornow
On Mon, Jul 11, 2016 at 4:27 PM, Pat Asher <arbenton(a)att.net> wrote:
At 12:52 PM 7/11/2016, Laverne Tornow via wrote:
> I have not tried logging in via ftp lately, but I do know they are in
> process of transferring to new servers. That might be the issue..
> Honestly,
> Me and several others have had ftp log in issues for a couple of years now
> on some of our sites which has caused us to upload our sites to
> alternative
> locations. I sometimes wonder if a lot of these problems are a way of
> getting rid of free webspace users!
>
If they didn't want to service existing users, why would they upgrade to
new servers?
Pat A.