Hello List Members The following is "For Your Information"...Please scan thru it and note that at some point soon the Morgan County Page and all others under USGenWeb will be off-line while changes are made. Hopefully it won't take them long to make the changes. You can still contact me at my email if you need help. Thanks for your patience while USGenWeb upgrades and improves. Julie --------- I'm sure you have all noticed (and many of you have commented) about the exceedingly slow and poor performance of our server in recent months. Things have been getting slower and slower, and I know this is extremely frustrating to our account owners and visitors alike. The cause of this slowdown is simple. As our hosted sites gain in popularity, our bandwidth consumption increases. USGenNet currently pays for roughly 50% of a T1 worth of bandwidth each month, but our traffic has increased so dramatically over the past year that we now need far more than that amount to keep us running in a fast, efficient manner. Our bandwidth provider, Big Sky Telcom, has only a bit more bandwidth available for us - far less than we presently need, and our needs will only continue to grow as time passes. To remain hosted by Big Sky Telcom, they would need to install an additional T1 line, just for USGenNet. And like any other business, they would then have to pass that expense off to us, which makes the price high indeed, when compared to other providers. The USGenNet board is now gathering quotes from other colocation providers and we hope to find one closer to our System Administrator so that he will have physical access to the server whenever the need should arise. Since increases in bandwidth mean increases in our monthly expenses, we are doing our best to get the most for every dollar USGenNet must spend. When the server is finally moved, all hosted USGenNet sites (including domains) will be offline for several days. We apologize for this down time, but it's necessary. The server will need to be crated and shipped to the new location, then unpacked and set up there. We will do our very best to insure that we aren't offline any longer than is absolutely necessary. We will make every effort to notify all those affected, and give you all plenty of warning before we go offline so that you'll know exactly what's happening and when we hope to be back online. Once the server is back online, you'll notice a big difference in the speed, both in viewing sites and in uploading files to your accounts and I'm sure you'll agree that the improved performance was worth being offline for a few days. The official USGenNet lists are now all running on the new Mailman software. We will be moving the hosted mail lists very soon, as this will all need to be accomplished prior to moving the server. Mailman allows each subscriber to set their own preferences for a variety of options, so you may want to check out the links at the bottom of this post. You can't access the Admin. page, put you'll be able to set yourself up with a password and select your subscription options. If you have questions, or wish to discuss the proposed move, you're invited to subscribe to our discussion list, USGN-all, by visiting this list's website here: http://www.usgennet.org/mailman/listinfo/usgn-all Ginger Cisewski President, USGenNet.Org _______________________________________________ Announce mailing list Announce@usgennet.org http://www.usgennet.org/mailman/listinfo/announce To unsubscribe from this list, send an empty message to announce-leave@usgennet.org This is a USGenNet Mailing List - http://www.USGenNet.Org/