Familysearch.org is a wonderful resource for genealogists and historians. It’s totally free and made available by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Don’t worry, no one will pester you to join or send you annoying spam.
Several of the resources include census, vital records indexes, the Social Security Death Index, maps, other websites, personal ancestry files and pedigrees. You are given free access to research helps and guides as well as many helpful forms to organize and track your data. Join newsgroups specific to your research interests. You can even submit your family tree if you’d like.
The site is well organized, easy to navigate, pleasant to the eye and easy to understand. All links are in working order and I have not had the occasion to contact tech support. There are no pop-ups but I was fed one tracking cookie. Even with this in mind I still rate it at 5 stars!