Moving the family tree

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The Rawsthorne Family Tree has had a number of homes over the years, starting with http://www.oxfamily.fateback.com, http://www.ozfamily.horrorking.com and now http://www.davidrawsthorne.com. This family tree includes the Field, Morris, Lees, Collits, Strickland and Rawsthorne lines to name but a few. I guess a bit of history of the websites is in order.

Back in 1998 I began a website dedicated to the writings of Stephen King. This began as simply a few pages on my local ISP's site, and progressed to a very popular site aptly named Horrorking Com. My Local ISP hosted the website for a moderate fee, but in recent times they have noticed an increase in traffic, making it uneconomic for them to continue unless they charged substantially more. What was costing the money was an increase in traffic from 2GB a month, to close to 10GB a month, with peaks up to 15GB.

It was this decision that started me looking at hosting Horrorking somewhere else. If I was going to move the site, then I may as well incorporate other websites I run into the one place, and my family tree and photograph sites were an obvious choice.

The combined family tree and picture sites totalled over 130MB (That's 130 million bytes of information - about 92 floppy discs!), so I needed decent storage space as I was rapidly approaching the limit of the existing host. After a few months of searching, and trialling various hosting companies, I chose a new location, and signed up for a package that included 30GB a month in data, 1GB storage, and a number of subdomains, one of which was http://www.ozfamily.horrorking.com and was used for the family tree. At the time the site attracted about 20,000 individual page views a month.

People were a little "put off" by the horrorking.com name, so I decided since it is my family tree, I may as well register my own name as the website for it. While I was at it I also registered domains for both my children, but they are used for nothing except email at this stage.

The initial design of the website included the family tree and photographs in one site, but there was no real "cross linking" between them. The family tree took a few hours to upload, and was very labor intensive to add updates such as new images of graves. This design worked for a year or so, and then I started playing around with Database driven websites. Initially I updated some parts of the family tree pages that were used to keep track of visitors, then my Stephen King pages were updated, followed by my Christmas Light pages.

The family tree was the last to get completely updated to this style, but when I found TNG (The Next Generation of site building), I realised that it was perfect for what I wanted. It incorporated images of people, graves, documents, video and other data into the family tree so users can seamlessly research their family and find all the information I have in one place. What helps is that updates take minutes rather than hours. Instead of creating, uploading and then verifying 300 or more .html pages, an update of the family tree now takes 5 minutes to upload a .ged file, 30 seconds to process and thats it - the new website is up and running. Uploading pictures is almost as easy and it can all be done from the one page.

The old static type website will be left in place (but not updated) until the end of January 2010, and then all users will be redirected to the new website, once a few more display screens are altered to display the data how I want it to be displayed. So far in the last month the website has had 40 additional graves added, and over 1,000 small updates to data and many large updates to dates, names and places to add additional people and correct missing or incomplete data.

Oh and as a side note, remember when I mentioned earlier that the family tree site was over 130MB in size? Well as of January 2010 that has grown to over 270MB of data, with 245MB of that being gravestones, and close to 50,000 full page views and 30,000 partial page views a month! Because the images are duplicated in the old style website as well as the new one, there is no wonder I want to move the website across to just using the new site.