Ask HN: would you pay $2000 now to host forever?

I believe I would, depending on the restrictions.

I would never pay a huge lump sum for a "forever" or "unlimited" service. Nothing lasts forever, nothing is unlimited.

Forever is a very long time. How forever is forever?

The problem with "Forever" in tech is that things change so fast that the only thing you can count on is that companies won't last forever -- even big ones.

Can you share your numbers and how you came up with $2000? (genuinely interested)

I already heard this end it ended really badly for a lot of customers because then the company changed. I don't remember the full story or the company but now I would not do it.

After hearing TextDrive change hands and waver on a commitment like this, it would have to be some kind of well-capitalized trust or foundation obligated not to default.

It depends on what is "forever" here. Like in some mobile plans in India, the lifetime validity ranges from 2 to 5 years. There would be some time limit (off course in years). So after looking at that number one can decide.

One way you could do this and make it feasible to last forever would be to form a non profit to take donations and volunteers, build a P2P system and get enough of a fan base to keep it going. That way you would only need volunteers to maintain the client software / protocols. The only cost would be the entry point domain and the servers to keep the web presence going, though it's possible you could find a hosting service which would donate the server space. Donations should cover any other costs.

The sites would need to be static snapshots and piggy back off the main domain. You could direct traffic from external domains, but those domains would likely die at some point. Perhaps you could even partner with a DNS service such as CloudFlare so that users could have an option to direct traffic to your service when certain actions happen (site is down for a certain amount of time.) The domain would still die eventually though, and the links would go with it. Ultimately I'm not sure that losing links would be a big deal anyways, as links to your main domain would die off eventually as well.

This service would be sort of like a love child of Tor and archive.org except that it would specifically be setup so that your site would always have a URL to reach the site directly rather than having to do a search. Archive.org might already have a scheme where links to a site snapshot will never change, but I'm not sure about that as it's probably not the main focus of the service.

I think this would be more interesting that attempting to build a commercial service. A commercial service would probably end up being like a ponzi scheme where you would need enough new users to cover costs to pay for the old users. Archive.org and Wikipedia seem to be doing okay though, so perhaps you could go the same route as a non profit but on more typical hosting infrastructure.

You'd need investment returns of at least 1% above inflation to pay for the cheapest hosting "forever". Is that feasible?

I still have 50 years to live at least. how many companies can last that long?

I absolutely wouldn't pay for more than ~5 years of service at any given time. That said, a model like NearlyFreeSpeech.net would make a lot of sense -- pay-as-you-go out of a fund that you keep putting money into.

Can you elaborate on the calculations. I don't quite see it. Let's say you use a run of the mill host like Dreamhost and pay around 110 dollars a year to host and renew, you would run out of money in 18 years. And if you truly wanted your service to be forever, you would want to trwat that 2000 as an endowment, which again doesn't make sense from a numbers standpoint (you would be LUCKY if you made 10pct a year).

Forever = how long you stay in business.