During the last 7 years I have never tried to profit from my GPP hosting service -- in fact, I actually supplement the cost of each website.  

Many of the wonderful people who have the time and motivation to undertake the management of these projects are retired or on a fixed income.  Therefore even though the disk space and bandwidth usage continues to grow -- I have not felt comfortable raising my prices accordingly.

This contributes to my decision to quit taking on new customers.

I have considered the option of helping individuals install the GPP software on their own server -- but have decided against it for good reason.

The main issue is that I am confident that anyone who has a project that they host on their own web hosting account will eventually suffer a catastrophic loss of their data.  

Over the last 10 years of doing web design, I have had the experience of working with many, many web hosting companies.  

Since web servers are just specialized computers -- they are susceptible to the same problems that affect desktop computers.  I don’t think I have ever gone more than 3 years without having a server crash and the hosting company have to do some type of restore.

In the past, when purchasing hosting from other companies -- I attempted to carefully pick services that claimed to have a good backup plan.  The problem is that on at least two occasions I have had the company tell me (after the crash) that their backup was corrupted and that I would need to restore from my own personal backup. 

To protect my own customers and all of the GPP photos and data -- ClickStart hosting customers have have rock-solid backups.  

• Each server has multiple drives with mirror copies of each sites data
• There are additional daily snapshot backups stored on the server
• Every day a copy of each site is also backed up to a remote location.
• We use state-of-the-art backup tools that efficiently synchronize the changes

You could try -- but you would no-doubt stop after your site reached a certain size.  

Most web hosting companies let you access to your files using something called FTP.   FTP allows you to easily copy files between your computer and the server -- and works great for standard websites with a few hundred files. 

The problem is that FTP is dumb.  If you tell FTP to download your site and only a single file has changed -- it will still download the entire site -- one file at a time.  If there is a hiccup in the process (your FTP download get’s interrupted) -- FTP starts over again from the beginning.

This isn’t a big deal if you are downloading a standard website that may consist of 5MB of files -- but GPP sites can become very large and often you are talking about hundreds and thousands of megabytes and could take hours to download.

For a medium sized GPP site the disk space for photos often exceeds 2GB.  Imagine starting an FTP session downloading your photos -- only to come back and find that the process has stopped for some reason.   You will need to start over again from square one and download everything again.

I am confident that there will be a point at which clients will quit doing manual backups.  The end result is that sometime in the future -- one-year, three-years, five-years from now -- projects without full daily backups will lose most if not all of their data.

Hundreds or thousands of people would have spent countless hours uploading, transcribing and approving photos for nothing.  

I feel that providing the software to individuals that aren’t capable of property backing up the software would be setting them up for failure.  My belief is that their time would be better spent contributing to one of the other well funded genealogy projects on the web.

Absolutely!  I want to reiterate that I am only talking about ending the expansion of the GPP. Existing GPP web hosting customers will continue to be supported.