This is a dedicated hosting service for webtrees.
If you are looking for fast, friendly, secure hosting for your family tree, this is it!
The server and the hosting service is operated by Fish Are Best limited, aka Greg Roach.
Hosting your family tree at hosting.webtrees.net gives you unbeatable support.
- Friendly, patient help from the webtrees lead developer.
- An integrated service, so you won't get your web-host blaming the application provider, or vice-versa.
- webtrees is updated regularly, and we can apply the updates for you automatically.
- Help with modifications, such as custom themes.
A service is only as strong as its upstream providers. We use long-established, profitable, global companies that are "too big to fail".
All computer hardware can fail and will fail. We take the following steps to mitigate against hardware failure.
- User files, database files and server configuration files are stored on network file-system. This is mirrored to an independent data-centre. It contains everything needed to run the site, so if the server is destroyed, we can be up and running on a new server, with no loss of data, in a matter of minutes.
- Daily file-system backups are held off-site. Six copies are made, which are stored on three continents.
Databases can fail. We take the following steps to mitigate against MySQL failures.
- A full SQL dump is made daily. This is included in the off-site file-system backup.
- Binary logs are kept online. From these, we can recover to any point in time during the last 40 days.
These precautions are designed to allow easy recovery from server failures. In the event of user failure - such as accidently truncating a table or deleting all your files - then we are able to restore the backup onto a second server, extract the data, and copy it back to the live server.
Of course, backup and recovery procedures need to be tested regularly, and these are done annually, or whenever there is a significant change to the infrastructure.
In October 2014, a hardware failure at the Dublin data-centre took out the server. Using the recovery procedures above, a server was commissioned in a different data centre, and was running 15 minutes later - with no loss of data.
This is a fast server, and most pages load in a fraction of a second.
As the service grows, we have a clearly defined upgrade path, including bigger servers, geographically distributed servers, and a content-delivery network.
- Can I run other applications, as well as webtrees?
- This is designed as webtrees hosting, rather than general purpose web hosting, and the server has been tuned to work with webtrees. Other applications will be considered, provided they are a secondary part of your site and do not impact the security or operation of the server. MediaWiki/WordPress is probably OK. Streaming video is probably not. Ask first.
- How much space do I have to store media files, etc?
- We've allocated 10GB per person. This is enough for over 350,000 copies of this picture. If you think you might need more than this, we can probably arrange it.
- I have a very big family tree. Can you cope?
- We host a tree of 500,000 individuals with no problem. If you have more than 1,000,000 individuals, we'd probably want to do some tests first, to make sure that it won't affect other users.
- I have my own domain name - can I use it?
- Yes. We do this for sites such as www.ghezibde.net. If you don't have your own domain name, we'll give you a subdomain here, such as http://your-name.webtrees.net/
- Can I see my web-server access and error logs?
- Yes. The last 90 days are kept online.
- Can I have a shell login?
- No, sorry. But we are happy to help you with any tasks that are easier with a shell login, such as recursively changing file permissions, etc.
Secure FTP and phpMyAdmin access are provided. Details are in the members area.
99 GBP per year or 8.50 GBP per month.
The service was designed to be good, rather than cheap. We want to show webtrees at its best. Cheaper hosting is available elsewhere.
You can use the donate button below to make your pay for your hosting, or to make a donation to the project.
