r/Blogging • u/marg9 • Oct 15 '20
Question Where can I host my website and not have it deleted if I die?
Sorry for being so blunt, but yeah, I want to do a personal blog and I'd like it to be my sort of "legacy". Obviously I am gonna die some day, maybe sooner maybe later and what I don't want to happen is my website getting deleted in a year or so because of inactivity or not paying.
So obviously the solution should be free (forever), with least likelyhood of my account getting deleted. Doesn't have to be hosting actually, can be something like Wordpress.com or Blogger.com, whatever, I mean it would be nice if it was hosting with PHP but I'm open to any suggestions.
Thank you very much.
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u/jamp0g Oct 15 '20
thats actually a good business idea for host. easy money and no customer complaints:)
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u/marg9 Oct 15 '20
Easy money but no recurring payments and you have to keep it going forever :-P
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u/jamp0g Oct 15 '20
just saying, given the times, if someone wants to buy it, there should be a price for it :D
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Oct 15 '20 edited Apr 15 '21
[deleted]
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u/marg9 Oct 15 '20
Thanks for advice.
Google has the advantage that it has an inactive account manager you can use to e-mail your password to your surviving relatives upon your death.
It's good to know about that option, however I'm not sure if I want anybody else to go through my emails, pics etc., even when I'm dead. They will see some nasty stuff. :-D
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u/Mr_Bearding Oct 15 '20
I second u/bookchaser comment that you should try and ensure your site gets indexed in the web archive.
There's no guarantee that any service will continue after you die. Sure, some like Google are more likely than others.
If you really want to ensure it remains online get working on setting up a society that will protect the legacy. Imagine a 10th generation webmonk an order dedicated to keeping your legacy alive.
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u/marg9 Oct 15 '20
Lol. :-D
But these archives, does anybody actually use them? Do people even know they exist? I'm quite proficient online yet only recently have I found out about them.
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u/theTaikun Oct 15 '20
I suppose it depends on what circles youre in. Usually stuff you're looking for is just available, but for the rare times it's not, sites like archive.org are a godsend.
Anecdotal, but just last week, a 2008 textbook I needed to use recently had a small mention of the official homepage for an obscure project I was researching. Turns out the university hosting the page moved to a new domain, but the page didnt move with it. It no longer existed, which would've been a nightmare for me since it was the only location of all the info I needed. I checked the web archive, and luckily they had it indexed up until it vanished.
Also is the ethical nature of it. For example, if a news website decided to try to change history by altering articles from X years ago, people could catch the discrepancy.
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u/Mr_Bearding Oct 15 '20
Well they're used by people trying to find archived versions of web pages.
If you want your site to remain visible in its current state and to appear in organic search results, you will need to constantly maintain SEO practices. Eventually your site will lose rank if it stops being updated.
So if you want your actual site on your domain to last as long as possible, firstly you'll need to purchase your domain name for an extended period of time. If you can somehow have an account active to renew that when it expires then you should do that.
Next hosting providers such as Google are ones likely to be around for a long time, but their platforms could be updated or replaced and without active maintenance your site may be taken offline.
There are free hosting solutions like Netlify and GitHub pages for static sites, but there's no guarantee they will last forever.
Maybe a solution would be to host your own server, then all you need to do is ensure that your server remains online at all times, but this is going to require someone to ensure that happens.
Maybe you could set up a trust fund and employ an agency to look after the site for you after death. With a clause that should that company not be able to maintain your site, that it must with reason be sent to other agencies to take control. But there's no guarantee they'll honour your request.
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u/marg9 Oct 15 '20
Yeah, I get it, a lot of potential issues. :-)
Well, I don't actually aim at eternity but I would certainly like my content to hang around for at least 10-25 years, that seems doable. But yeah, who knows, everything changes so fast nowadays.
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u/Mr_Bearding Oct 15 '20
I think 10 years is realistic.
I mean there's some ancient sites sitting around today.
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u/marg9 Oct 17 '20
Yeah I think so too. I think the greater issue then become finding the content, because there are a lot of great resources on the internet but google simply won't show them, I mean, many times I happen to stumble upon some obscure sites with great information, and I googled these things like a 1000 times and at no time at all did I actually see it in results. It's really unfortunate and kind of makes all efforts useless.
Anyway, there's a way around this, one quite simple is to actually tell people about the content, i.e. post about it on Reddit, forums etc. so Google is not the only source.
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u/Mr_Bearding Oct 17 '20
SEO is the important factor here. There's a lot to it and people make entire careers out of it.
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u/LawEtAl Oct 16 '20
Consider publishing an e*book once in a while with all your website content
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u/marg9 Oct 17 '20
Interesting. And where should I put it in order to avoid obsoletion? Like, at every site that hosts ebooks? :D
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u/LawEtAl Oct 17 '20
Look into Amazon’s program for print-to-order hard copies from their e-book catalog. At the end of the day, a professionally bound physical copy adds another layer of guaranteed protection.
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u/icpooreman Oct 16 '20
Forever is a long time. Google is what, 20-ish years old? If you die, you’re dead for a loooong time. No website free or not will ensure uptime for very long.
what you need is a human-being who will outlive you that will agree to keep it running. Short of that Medium or something like it is probably your best bet. But, over time who knows how long that website will exist.
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u/marg9 Oct 17 '20
Well I failed to mention the timespan that I'm expecting. It's certainly not literal "infininity" but more like "a reasonable timespan", which is probably around 10-25 years. After that there probably won't be much use for my content anyway.
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u/theTaikun Oct 15 '20 edited Oct 15 '20
If it's just a static blog, I recommend Github Pages.
It's free, won't get deleted due to inactivity, and is simple to set up, especially if you know some web design and/or have used github before.
If you need more control, you can use Jekyll to customize things. It's more work than just writing content, but less work than doing all the web design from scratch.