The Genealogist

Paul’s Weekly Ponderings

December 17, 2006 on 7:25 pm | In Amateur Genealogist News, Finding Ancestors, Genealogy, Family History, Family Tree, Geneology, Genealogist, Web Hosting, 1911 Census, GenMates, Free Genealogy Search, Free Genealogy Search Engine |

The exciting news this week is about The 1911 UK Census. You may (or there again may not!) remember that I set up a site for a Petition to get the 1911 UK Census released early some months ago.

Well………… I am not claiming that it is entirely down to the signatures we got but I heard the news that the information from the 1911 Census will now be available from January 2007 rather than the original date of January 2012. The aim is to have a fully searchable copy on the Internet by January 2009!

I must admit it’s given me a bit of a buzz! This for me is absolutely what we are about in terms of Marketing on The Internet - really adding value to the niches in which we operate.

If you are one of my subscribers then you will be aware that the last two weeks have been something of a challenge! This all resulted from a major outage by one of our hosting companies which lasted for some time and saw lots of data lost by them. It impacted about 50% of my business with some of our most significant sites going offline and the domain names being inaccessible to amend the DNS for!

So as you can imagine the last few weeks have seen quite a few long days getting things back up and running and I am pleased to say that of this morning almost every major site is now back on line and fully functional. It has also seen the creation of a number of new sites and the redeployment of other sites.

The good news for Genealogists is that our sites at The Amateur Genealogist, Free Genealogy Search Engine, Catholic Genealogy and Genealogy Articles are all now back online!

What have I learnt from the last few weeks? Well in summary here’s my top pieces of advice. Always make sure that you have your hosting spread around a number of major hosts so that you can always shift things around in the event of a problem; ensure that you back up your sites and any databases on a regular basis; ensure that your hosts also back up data on a regular basis. If you are serious about hosting then you need to look at getting a Reseller Account and one of the best that I hav come across is Hostgator who I have found to be excellent.

Finally in terms of my recommendations and this is a big one! Never ever, under any circumstances buy your domain names from your hosts! That way lies complete disaster if your host goes down and you then cannot access your account. If you cannot access your account with your host then you cannot amend the DNS an point your sites to an alternative host.

Now before all that happened I had been well on with my planning for 2007 and thought that I knew what we were going to do! However, the coincidence of the problems with one of our hosts and also reading an excellent report from Niche Mania’s BigMike called “Google Hiccup” set me thinking! If you haven’t taken a look at Niche Mania then you really want to - it’s one of the very few memberhips that I ever recommend for anyone interested in making money online.

The areas we will focus on in terms of our primary niches will remain as originally planned. However, our approach to those niches and the value we will be adding is going to be much mroe focussed.

One of the things that we are currently very focussed on is evolving the highly successful GenMates community and you can read more about that at GenMates Changes - this is a set of changes which is in response to the fedback from our members. I think this is going to be really exciting!

The other two major developments which have suffered a bit of a set back are my Internet Marketing Coaching Site and my Self Improvement Coaching Site - however with a few more days work on these they will be ready to go early in the new year! You can sign up for the heavy discount on the Internet Marketing one by going to Internet Business Creators!

Have a good week and if you are one of my subscribers watch out for a very useful Christmas Gift!