From: "Dr. Brian Leverich" 
     Subject: RootsWeb in February -- 1,000,000+ Hits Per Day
 Resent-From: [email protected]
          To: Steve Coker

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       https://sites.rootsweb.com/
P.O. Box 6798, Frazier Park, CA 93222-6798      [email protected]

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