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Ask HN: Prepaid long-term web hosting

9 pointsby malchowalmost 7 years ago
Here’s a question for you brilliant folks. Suppose you are at the end of a spectacular career — a writer, an engineer, a CEO, whatever. And that you’ve created a simple static site that showcases your life’s work. Mostly HTML&#x2F;CSS&#x2F;PNGs. Maybe some downloadable files.<p>Suppose further that you have no kids.<p>You’d like to get this site hosted on a custom domain. You want it to be available as far into the future as possible. Money is not really a limitation. You can prepay. In fact, you <i>want</i> to prepay.<p>How would you go about setting up a simple HTML site to last far into the future? Which vendors would you use? What extra layers&#x2F;protections would you build in?<p>Would you select the optimal DNS&#x2F;registrar and host? Or would you select one vendor for all three functions?

7 comments

demygalealmost 7 years ago
I’ll give a non-technical answer: set up a legal trust. This is the typical way a person has their wishes carried out after their death.
ryanmerceralmost 7 years ago
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.tutsplus.com&#x2F;tutorials&#x2F;hosting-your-website-after-death--cms-23492" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.tutsplus.com&#x2F;tutorials&#x2F;hosting-your-website-aft...</a><p>Seems to be a decent read on the subject, it even shows at least one service (I just scanned it) that promised to do this then went belly up.
kennxflalmost 7 years ago
The best way is to set up a trust. Domains and hosting have a maximum period before renewal longest being 20 years. A trust ensures the renewals are completed. One legitimate vendor e.g. Google, would be the best option.
cimmanomalmost 7 years ago
What&#x27;s the goal? How long term is long-term? (A couple decades? A couple centuries? A couple millennia?)<p>For the really long term, printing something and getting it into some major archives (library of congress, etc) may be your best bet to persist information.<p>For somewhat long term, perhaps archive.org or another organization with a related mission might be part of the strategy?
lioetersalmost 7 years ago
I had a similar idea of an &quot;eternal bit&quot; - to break the problem down, how much would it cost to host a bit for the next X centuries? Not sure if there&#x27;s a realistic or practical solution.
87almost 7 years ago
I&#x27;d use ipfs as the authoritative storage. Some scripts triggering archiving on the major internet archives.<p>You could, say, buy 3 tlds for the same name and have different strategies for each.<p>If money really isn&#x27;t a problem you could put the data on the bitcoin blockchain.
mabynogyalmost 7 years ago
I know ramnode and ovh accept prepayment (maybe more than one year for ramnode).<p>The simplest is to make a static website, put it on GitHub pages, and make your domain point to that.