I am passing along a couple of messages from Dr. Brian Leverich who with his wife Karen Isaacson own and operate the Rootsweb Data Cooperative. Rootsweb supplies the web space for most of the USGenWeb county pages and the county / state Mail lists for no charge. Rootsweb is supported by Members and Sponsors. It costs just $12/year to become a Member and $24/year to become a Sponsor. If you would like to join and help out, see the instructions at the end of this message. Thanks Message 0ne: --------<snip>------------------------------------------------ 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. Message Two: --------<snip>------------------------------------------------ We're doing better than last month -- at least RootsWeb's posting the February statistics before the end of March. (: 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. The executive summary is that 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). As always, RootsWeb remains supported by user contributions. Folks who would like to become a RootsWeb Member or Sponsor (the cost is very modest) are invited to visit: http://www.rootsweb.com/rootsweb/how-to-subscribe.html *** You can become a Member easily using your credit card and our new secure server. *** Support from the Internet genealogical community is *crucial* to RootsWeb's operation. Right now, we could be hosting many more Websites and mailing lists as well as providing many further services to the community, if only we had the resources to do so. Thanks to everyone who participates in RootsWeb -- clearly folks are continuing to exchanging a great deal of information! -B -----<snip>-------------------------------------------------- -- John E Cain; 4601 Concord Drive; Garland, TX 75042 http://www.rootsweb.com/~msamite/index.htm -----Amite County MS http://www.rootsweb.com/~jecain/index.htm ----Cain/Ware list and My Website.