Ask HN: How to make my website exist for 100 years?

If you're wishing your writings to be read by your children, why not print them on paper — and so in duplicate amounts kept in different places — that they will eventually find?

I think, in your case, it would be easier to keep physical copies of those texts than try to keep a digital version of them up for a hundred years. And far less expensive.

Also, you'd be leaving them a more precious thing. I'd be far more excited discovering papers that my father/mother wrote and left for me than, say, seeing them on the internet.

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.

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.

Wordpress.com offers 100-year plans. Hosting + domain is $38,000 or domain only is $2,000.

https://wordpress.com/100-year/

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.

Are books not websites in a way.. easy to print the articles and have it printed as a book.

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

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...

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]

[0] https://www.arweave.org/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System

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.

0: https://lawprof.co/flashcard/what-is-capriciousness

RE How to make my website exist for 100 years?

Get it archived in Wayback machine and other web archive sites ....

To put it as simply as possible. Try to stick to plain text as much as possible. Of course, let something like an SSG (Static Site Generator) handle the HTML conversion. Before you die, set/ask someone or an entity to host the HTML on a server that can host HTML (should be in 100+ years too).

As for the domain, keep renewing it a few years ahead whenever you remember. I’m sure there are registrars where you can add credit, and it auto-renews.

Personally (and I’m not sure and haven’t even started), I really liked owning and helping others own their digital assets online. So, I have been meaning to, or would really like to, start an Internet Business (registrar, hosting, email, forms, etc.). Thus, an entity that can live on after me, that does business while owning the current Internet Assets that I own now.

metal disks with bumps have lasted for over 200 years.

do that.

Stones with calendars carved into them have lasted for over 6000 years.

do that.

Obviously the only pragmatic solution is to enslave a whole continent and force them to create a pyramid with edifices of your likeness.

while that happens simply chase the moon to ensure the day.

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.

So funny to See sone Folks Talking about the tech Stack when Hosting is the only Problem to solve

I suggest saving the files as text/markdown and sending them to your children as an email zip file. You could also print a book and give copies to your children and grandchildren.

“Only wimps use tape backup. REAL men just upload their important stuff on ftp and let the rest of the world mirror it.” - Linus Torvalds

When we go, our children will throw almost everything away. And this is ok.

Information regularly moves storage devices or dies. If your work is not already published / disseminated by the public then it will disappear.

And this is ok.

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?

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.

Encode your data as qr codes and etch them onto diamonds. Your data lasts virtually forever in the form of family heirlooms.

Using modern femtosecond lasers, you can etch codes as small as 250 to 500 microns. Total Capacity (5 Diamonds): 180 QR codes (36 per diamond) = 230 KB of data.

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.

The good thing is, with AI scraping everything today, it will be incorporated into the AI - so your content will continue to exist in the weights.

In that way, your thoughts will live on ...

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.

Solve this and you probably have a business. :)

This is the best HN questionn a long time. Great thought exercise.

If you put it on Bitcoin blockchain it will probably outlast the internet.

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.

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.

The best way to preserve something is not with technology or any particular storage medium.

The only way to ensure something is preserved is for there to be living humans who care about the thing enough to put forth the effort to preserve it.

Information that is stored in very fragile old formats is well preserved because there are living humans who are putting forth the effort. Information that nobody cares about, but is stored very securely, will be culled eventually as even libraries and archives have limited capacity.

If you want your personal website to be preserved, the best thing you can do is make it so good that your children, or someone else, cares about it enough to keep it.

Have a bunch of kids and grandkids and raise them to honor your wishes. That's the only way.

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...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46611593