Subscribers, please forgive me for sending this on to all of you, but I feel that you should know what is happening at RootsWeb and how it affects you. Many of you new subscribers may not know, but Brian and Karen at RootsWeb operate at a loss every year. We Listowners pay our fees for having these Lists (notice that we PAY for the privilege of being Listowners), and most of us pay much more than the minimum required contribution. You subscribers pay NOTHING for being able to use the Lists; there never is a fee for being a subscriber, and that will never change; however, RootsWeb DOES depend on generous subscribers sending in whatever they can to RootsWeb just to help out. If any of you feel generous and want to help, RootsWeb is always grateful for even small contributions. A dollar or two, $5, or whatever you can spare would go a long way to ensuring that this wonderful service continues to provide us with an almost unlimited opportunity to exchange ideas and data. Brian doesn't say so here, but last year RootsWeb spent $60,000+ more for necessary hardware and software than was received in the form of contributions, fees, etc. Fortunately Brian and Karen are able to do this without having to mortgage their home. (GRIN) But, you could all help out a little by some small contribution. PLEASE DO NOT CONSIDER THIS A COERCIVE PLOY TO GET YOU TO CONTRIBUTE. If you don't want to, you don't have to. You may go on receiving the many bene- fits of RootsWeb without ANY contribution. You can use "snail mail" and send contributions to: RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative P.O. Box 6798 Frazier Park, CA 93222-6798 You may use RootsWeb Credit Card utility for contributing at this URL: http://www.rootsweb.com/rootsweb/how-to-subscribe.html In any case, do whatever your conscience allows. We will all be grateful. Below is Brian's latest update on the happenings at RootsWeb. (If you are not already a contributing member of the RootsWeb family, you might consider becoming one. There are many benefits of being a contributor, which you will find out if you go to the web site and read about subscribing, including hosting Lists, having Web Pages, etc. If you know of any genealogy researchers who might like to join us, let them know. After all, any server that handles close to 100 MILLION pieces of email a month has to be doing something right. SOMEONE must be gaining valuable information from the Lists!) ************************************************** This note is going to tell you that RootsWeb set a new record level of service to the genealogical community last month, but a more important message that I'd like to convey first is just how important your support has been. RootsWeb wouldn't be here without you. In February, without your support we couldn't have purchased a generator to keep the servers up during the El Nino storms, a new search engine server for the USGenWeb and mailing list archives, and a new server to host Cyndi Howells' Website and the USGenWeb query systems. Your continued support is essential to us: just to keep up with demand, in the next few weeks we're going to have to upgrade the main Web server, upgrade the mail hub server, and start preparing to add a third list server. All that costs money. And beyond those inescapable upgrades, we really want to be building a kitty for buying genealogical datasets and bringing more new services online for the whole community. If you can spread the word and help us find more Members, Sponsors, and Donors, you'll be helping us keep up with demand and bring new data and services online. *** AND NOW FOR THE REPORT *** February was an incredible month: El Nino storms repeatedly caused us to lose power, and I wound up having to 4-wheel- drive off the mountain in a snowstorm to find and buy a generator to keep RootsWeb online. Because of our batteries and our generator, we were down only minutes even though the power was off for days. Also, Cyndi Howells' Website moved to RootsWeb right in the middle of the storms and the USGenWeb query system needed more CPU cycles and bandwidth, so we added a server and load balanced our T1 connections to the Internet right in the midst of all the snowfalls and power outages. We had about 11% absolute growth during just the month of February, but that's deceptively low because February is a short month. Our actual *daily* load increased about 20%: o 29,372,613 Web files (27,751,946 in Jan) from 2,488 Websites (2,400 in Jan). - 8,602,112 were HTML pages (not images or cgi-bin) (8,308,561 in Jan). - 3,446,096 were cgi-bin database searches and such. (3,574,701 in Jan). - 17,248,967 were GIFs (15,850,655) or JPEGs (1,398,312) (15,784,790 in Jan were GIFs (14,529,204) or JPEGs (1,255,586). o 644,950 FTP file downloads from the USGenWeb Archives and the ROOTS-L Library (618,762 in Jan). o Thanks to a neat hack by Tim Pierce, we know we shipped about 82,150,000 pieces of mail (88,649,000 in Jan) pieces of mail to the 3,050+ (2,600 in Jan) mailing lists we host. (The 82 million is probably low; we had to archive a significant amount of mail before the count because of a disk space crunch on one of the mail servers ... ) o 60,000 alt.g and s.g.* Usenet News articles to hosts on three continents (same as Jan). o Approximately 505,361,000,000 bytes in total (451,786,000,000 in Jan). And that's what RootsWeb did in February. Let me thank you once again for supporting RootsWeb -- none of this would be available to the community without your help, and your continuing support can help us grow and provide even more service to the community. Thank you, B. -- Dr. Brian Leverich Co-moderator, soc.genealogy.methods/GENMTD-L RootsWeb Genealogical Data Cooperative http://www.rootsweb.com/ P.O. Box 6798, Frazier Park, CA 93222-6798 leverich@rootsweb.com