alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: How to make my website exist for 100 years?
I have personal website and a lot of writings that I want to keep, also for my children one day will read those. How do I make my domain + content exist for a really long time? Domain + Server must be paid of annually, do I need to switch to other way of hosting?
Comments
The proper way to do it is how it was done always. Teach your kids. If they grow up and your teachings stand the test of time, they will pass it to their kids, and so on...
Are books not websites in a way.. easy to print the articles and have it printed as a book.
I suggest you start converting your writing into short digestible Tiktok dance moves...
Joking aside, paper is resilient. Share your digital writings everywhere, then make paper copies that you can donate to libraries. If this fails, that's fine. You won't be around to see it.
See https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1017715/Humanity-s-Last-Game-T... from 1hr and 17 second mark for ideas on how to make something survive.
honestly though, no one know how to make your "website" exist for 100years. Websites have only existed for ~35 years.
https://sdf.lonestar.org has been around since 1987. They have a one-time lifetime membership fee of $36.
I feel like I would trust them more than probably anyone else for hosting a static website for a 100 years.
Do multiple or all of the things mentioned in the other comments for redundancy, then set up a Delaware non-charitable purpose trust with a reasonably large endowment. Make sure your lawyers plan the trust carefully with reliable enforcement and position it to be well defended against "capriciousness"[0] claims.
1. Defend against format obsolescence. Prefer plain-text formats, or at least ones that can be mostly-understood by humans, like markdown or semantic XML. (And not, say, PDFs.) For audio-visual stuff, prefer the simplest kinds of highly standardized and common formats.
2. If you need a website, prefer a static site generator. If you need a dynamic site, periodically export a static version.
3. Don't count entirely on the hosting service, store offline copies (as a standard zip file) alongside other content of interest to heirs, such as a will. Distribute redundant copies to relatives.
RE How to make my website exist for 100 years?
Get it archived in Wayback machine and other web archive sites ....
If you had the same goal ~25 years ago what would you have done? Are those top options still around or bankrupt, have their prices and services changed dramatically?
You might be interested in Arweave or IPFS:
Arweave network is like Bitcoin, but for data: A permanent and decentralized web inside an open ledger. [0]
The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a decentralized protocol, hypermedia, and peer-to-peer (P2P) network for distributed file storage and sharing. The shadow libraries Anna's Archive and Library Genesis host books via IPFS. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System
Putting static copies on Github Pages, Cloudflare Pages, and the Internet Archive would make pretty good odds it's preserved. The only real way to make sure would be to set up and fund some sort of trust to basically hire someone to run it after you're gone.
Wordpress.com offers 100-year plans. Hosting + domain is $38,000 or domain only is $2,000.
write it to a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC or something similar and put it somewhere safe, like a bank, with a reader. why do you need to host it if it is for your kids? maybe a real answer is to pay someone or make some elaborate rube goldberg redundancy apparatus on some p2p mesh network or whatever.
Pay someone.
Seriously.
They'll be loads of unexpected things that come up that can't be anticipated.
Just look at some of the websites that were abandoned in the early 2000-2010s but which are still actively hosted today but that are broken now due to modern browsers refusing to load cross-origin resources, or the server's ciphers are no longer accepted etc. They're still online, you just can't see the content with today's computers. You need a human (...or potentially an AI?) there to intervene and resolve those problems to keep it going.
Sure you might say well my writings are not using HTTPS or I don't make cross-origin requests, but that totally misses the point. Who knows in 50 years you may not even be able to read ASCII text in consumer browsers any more without specialist archival/library tools, just like we can't use what we're at the time totally legitimate SSL ciphers.
I think that archiving your writings is different from having your site active and casually available.
20 years - google doc with backups in your email and wherever your taxes and medical stuff is, and printed copy with your home records
40 years - print and bind the google doc in 20 years, store it with their stuff when they leave the house.
60 years - publish the book buy a bunch of copies and distribute
100 years - it needs to be a very good book
Have a bunch of kids and grandkids and raise them to honor your wishes. That's the only way.
Solve this and you probably have a business. :)
Simpler is better. Ideally, it should be a static site, and hostable on any domain.
Failing that, choose technologies that have been around for a while. PHP, Ruby, and Java have been around for 20+ years, and are still going strong. There is no hope that anything touching Node or npm will run in a year.
So funny to See sone Folks Talking about the tech Stack when Hosting is the only Problem to solve
Write a book, send a copy to the Internet Archive, upload the digital version. Leave your kids the ISBN or Archive.org item identifier. Donate $2/GB uploaded if you can afford it.
You could also have the Internet Archive crawl your site to preserve it if the above is too much trouble, with it being accessible through Wayback.
https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donat...
https://help.archive.org/help/uploading-a-basic-guide/
https://hackernoon.com/the-long-now-of-the-web-inside-the-in...
If you are into super villainy, invest in a giant laser to etch your website onto the moon.
Create your own Voyager probe with a golden disk. If you can orient it to avoid any collisions, could survive to the end of the universe.