Ask 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?
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 50.8 ms ] threadhttps://wordpress.com/100-year/
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.
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.
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
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
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
Get it archived in Wayback machine and other web archive sites ....
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.
honestly though, no one know how to make your "website" exist for 100years. Websites have only existed for ~35 years.
(and assuming you don't have millions of dollars handy to put towards this goal - I could probably build you something pretty OK, but the cost might get into tens of millions or more depending on how many nines you want on that "chance of it existing in 100 years" figure)
I also agree with others who say "print out multiple redundant copies and put them in filing cabinets and/or bank vaults". This is probably the most reliable way to have a high probability of it lasting that long without spending a lot.
The core issue that you're going to have is that it's impossible to predict whether any institution you might trust to hold on to the data will still exist in 100 years. Having multiple copies on multiple redundant hosts gives you a higher chance, but it's still not possible to say what that chance is. And that's before we start thinking about things like climate change and the water wars everyone loves to predict.
I feel like I would trust them more than probably anyone else for hosting a static website for a 100 years.
0: https://lawprof.co/flashcard/what-is-capriciousness
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.
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.
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.
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.
In that way, your thoughts will live on ...