This posting was prompted by listening to Linda Yip's recent presentation on Legacy Family Tree Webinars. Linda is an author, researcher, and storyteller who has been invited to speak at businesses and non-profits, colleges and historical societies in Canada and the United States.
https://familytreewebinars.com/webinar/five-reasons-to-build-a-genealogy-website/
Her personal website is: https://past-presence.com/
Over the years I have had at least a dozen personal websites on a variety of FREE webhosts. These have been free but rather undependable over the long haul. Linda Yip has avoided this issue by paying for her own sites. I should have done the same. I think it would have saved me a lot of time and frustration. If I was 20 years younger I would probably give it a try.
I have seen my free sites disappear as the webhosts have disappeared, stopped hosting free sites, been acquired by other companies, and so forth.
One especially strange situation was my website on byethost17.com, which disappeared suddenly. I posted my content on a different free site, which disappeared within a few months. But then my website on byethost suddenly reappeared, but with no way for me to edit it. This site has recently disappeared again.
My solution has been to make sure my main content is uploaded to FamilySearch and supplemented by blogs on Blogger and a bit of Youtube. These are free and probably as permanent as anything on the internet.
The advantages of a personal webpage are hard to ignore. You control the contents. You can use it to teach, inspire, sell your products, become discovered by fellow researchers and unknown cousins. Unlike a blog, you do not need to conform to a particular pattern.
