"Family History Hosting" is a new web hosting service owned and operated by John Cardinal, a person well known for the software he produces: Second Site, a database modification tool called TMG Utility, and a calendar and anniversary utility called On This Day. I decided to take a look at http://www.familyhistoryhosting.com.
Disclaimer: I may be biased because I have known John for years and admire his work. Then again, that may be a testimonial: I have known John for years and admire his work. To view a video of a conversation I had with John last year concerning his other projects, look at: http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2007/12/video-an-interv.html .
Family History Hosting provides first-class web hosting services for genealogists and family historians. The site is owned and operated by a genealogist who knows what a GEDCOM file is and understands why it is important. With some rather unusual offerings, the hosting service also hopes to attract non-technical and semi-technical customers. The company's web site says:
We eliminate the technical hassles and barriers that prevent you from publishing your work. We know that you want to spend your time researching, communicating with members of your family, and breaking through brickwalls. Any time you spend wrestling with web-related challenges is time wasted.
We have designed a hosting service that is custom-designed to meet your needs. We don't provide the dizzying array of options available at some web hosts because frankly, you don't need them. All that clutter confuses the issue and forces you to learn about technologies that are not pertinent to your hobby.
Meanwhile, we are prepared to add scripts and features on a by-request basis for those users with particular needs.
Behind the scenes, we protect you from common web problems like bandwidth stealing, where unscrupulous people reference images from your site on their web pages to transfer the bandwidth load from their web host to yours. You may not even be aware of such schemes, but we are, and we're here to help.
Family History Hosting adds no advertising to your pages. Your visitors will see only the information you place there. In addition, you can register your own domain name and use it for your pages hosted at Family History Hosting, such as http://my-genealogy-site.com or whatever name you register.
The same site also proclaims:
Our state of the art datacenter is staffed 24/7/365. There are multiple sources for everything the datacenter needs: network connections, electrical power, air conditioning, etc. That means your site will be available despite power outages, network outages, or other technical difficulties. We can promise 99.9% uptime because our partners deliver better than 99.9% uptime to us!
Prices vary from $69.99 a year up to $189.99 a year, depending upon the disk space and bandwidth included. Those prices include unlimited domains, free set-up, and no hidden charges. Those prices are equivalent to $5.83 a month for a typical genealogy site up to $15.83 a month for a very large site and are very competitive with other hosting services that are not owned by genealogists. However, the only option is for an annual payment.
This looks like a winner for genealogists. I can vouch for the frustrations and challenges of dealing with web services, and I suspect many people will be happy to let Family History Hosting handle those complexities for them. If you want to post your personal genealogy pages or even your genealogy business pages on a service that understands genealogy, is owned and operated by genealogists, and guarantees 99.9% uptime, you might want to look at http://www.familyhistoryhosting.com.
If you are a present Second Site customer, look for the special offer being made only to Second Site users.
