John Cardinal has a second site; Family History Hosting. John Cardinal is the author of the oddly named Second Site, a web site generator for The Master Genealogist. He is also the owner of Family History Hosting LLC.
Family History Hosting is a new commercial site for hosting family trees. The domain name was registered on 2005 Sep 5 already, and the about page claims that Family History Hosting LLC was founded in 2007, but it apparently took a year to get everything up and running.
That Family History Hosting is now open for business was announced through the Second Site News and the Wholly Genes Newsletter.
Hosting with Family History Hosting (FHH) is expensive. FHH does not charge per megabyte, kilobyte or even per byte. Family History Hosting does not even charge per bit. Family History Hosting charges per millibit!
You need to combine several hosting plans to be able to host just one byte. With the currently advertised plans, the cheapest way to host one byte is to combine sixteen copies of the "Standard II", for a total of US$ 720 (minus 16 cent) per year. Pricey.
The page with the hosting plans use "mb" (millibit) instead of "MB" (megabyte) and "gb" (g-bit) instead of "GB" (gigabyte). These basic mistakes do not engender trust in their technical expertise.
Another statement that many may take issue with is that a gigabyte is
1.000.000.000 bytes. Seagate used that tactic to market their hard disks, and
decided to settle a class-action lawsuit over that. After all, in computing, a
gigabyte is 1.073.741.824 bytes, right? The difference is more than 7 %.
However, the statement is correct. A gigabyte is 1.000.000.000 bytes and
1.073.741.824 bytes should really be referred to as gibibyte (GiB) to avoid all
possible confusion.
Family History Hosting has three hosting plans to choose from. The major difference between these three plans is the maximum disk space. You might expect the maximum disk space for these three plans to be 256 MB, 512 MB and 1024 MB, but the advertised maxima are 250 MB, 500 MB and 750 MB.
Prices for the three plans are one cent less than US$ 70, US$ 120 and US$ 190 per annum. FHH does not accept monthly payments. Note that although the second plan is cheaper per megabyte than the first plan, but that the third plan is actually more expensive per megabyte than the second plan.
The third plan does includes double the number of FT and email accounts. I do not expect many genealogists to care about that, but it might be of interest to a family society that wants accounts for the entire team. More importantly, the third option also includes double the bandwidth.
The price includes bandwidth, but not unlimited bandwidth. The bandwidth is limited to one GB per month, or 2 GB per month is you opt for the priciest package. One GB a month should be enough for small and text-only sites, but is not hard to exceed that 1 GB mark if your site includes photos and videos. It is a bit baffling that the site does not list what happens when you exceed it - will access be denied, or will you get an extra bill?
The site claims to be HTML 4, which is the lowest still more or less acceptable standard, but it does not validate. The character encoding specified is "iso-8859-1" (ISO Latin 1) instead of the W3C-recommended UTF-8. NoScript warns me that the site is trying to run scripts. All this does not create a professional impression.
A brief look at the source for the site page shows that it uses CSS, but in a sloppy way. There is an external style sheet, but the page uses internal styles and even inline styles. The only thing sloppier than inline CSS is deprecated HTML styling, which the site does not use. The About Us page notes that "Second Site is very versatile; it was used to create this site, for example!". Apparently, creating general web pages is not Second Site’s strongest feature. The first thing I expect from any web site generation tool is that it pages validate, but Second Site’s output does not.
Although FHH is not limited to Second Site users, Second Site users do get special treatment. For a limited time (unspecified), they get three months free. At current prices, that is a US$ 17,50, US$ 30,00 or US$ 47,50 value, while Second Site retails for $29,50. Obviously, any TMG users who decides to host with FHH but has not bought Second Site yet, would do well to buy that first.
The site is running WHCMS, an all-in-one site management package. It features
include an Announcements section. It seems to offer an RSS feed for the
announcement, but when I tried to subscribe using FeedDemon, it failed to
download the file.
The site’s best feature may be the HelpBase, which is an easily updated wiki.
One glance at the URL for the wiki makes clear that FHH is running the PHP scripting language. If you follow the site’s menu to server status, you’ll find that it currently seems to be running on top of a Linux operating, an Apache web server, a MySQL database and the PHP scripting language, version 5.2.4. That’s known as a LAMP setup; Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.
Now, FHH aims at customers who do not care much about such things, but I
mention it because there is an issue here. Some web genealogy software that its
customers might wish to use needs PHP and MySQL to be available, but it is not
clear at all whether FHH is offering these technologies to its customers.
The hosting plan does not list either as a feature, while it does list FrontPage
Server Extensions (FPSE). That is a deprecated technology Microsoft last updated
in 2002. Microsoft is now using the WebDAV standard, so it is puzzling to see
FHH still pushing this proprietary technology.
FHH’s hosting is not particular expensive, but not cheap either. Just google "cheap web hosting" to find out how little bandwidth is really worth these days. Then again, when you opt for budget hosting, you will either have to know what your doing or pay for every little extra and every bit support.
Family History Hosting promises 99,9 % uptime through a data centre That’s staffed 24/7. That is not FHH’s own data centre, but the data centre of the company that performs the actual hosting.
Family History Hosting specialises in hosting genealogy sites and Second Site in particular. Those who sign up early will get the very best deal; a free technical support session to not just help you get started with the site, but even help you install any needed software on your PC. That offer is limited by John Cardinal’s available time and unlikely to last long.
Incidentally, Second Site should soon feature a menu that lets you refresh your published web site without needing a separate file transfer program. That’s good news for all Second Site users, regardless of their hosting solution.
The introductory message claims that you use own domain name when you use FHH, but does not state whether registering that name is included in the price or service.
There are cheaper and free hosting alternatives, but the real competition may be the sites where you can host your family tree for free, existing services like geneanet and the new ones like WebTree. With a focus on serving non-technical Second Site users, Family History Hosting might be able to carve out a niche for itself, but only if it manages to deliver top service to make it worth the top dollar it is charging.
WebTree ceased operation in 2010, see WebTree no more. The broken WebTree link has been removed.
The IEC seems to have deleted its page on binary number prefixes. The broken link has been removed.
The linux.org domain seems to have disappeared early in February of 2011. The broken link has been removed.
Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.