Ancestry.com subscribers go wild

As an update to our previous post, we want to let you know that we are currently working on unplanned maintenance on the Ancestry Member Trees system. We expect family trees on Ancestry.com and its related international sites to be down for an extended period today.

I wouldn’t call it “mission critical” software, but the people who pay US$239 for a three year subscription to the ancestry.com website take their work seriously. Other than family photos, it takes a leap of faith to put dozens, or hundreds, of hours of work into a family tree and then trusting it to the cloud with a SAAS site. If Open Table goes down, you just call the restaurant; in the case of your family tree, you pace waiting to find out if all has been lost.

Ancestry.com’s (ACOM:Q) recent TV series with folks like Spike Lee did a lot to bring the family tree effort into the mainstream. But the ongoing “unplanned maintenance” has generated 1,575 comments so far on the Ancestry.com blog, and few of them are positive.

For a would-be NASDAQ IPO success, these are the kind of glitches you want to manage. After all, unhappy subscribers lead to unhappy shareholders.

MRM