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Ask HN: How long will your personal website likely survive if you die today?
How long will it likely still be reachable via https?
Is the Internet Archive at least saving some of it for now?
Do you not keep anything interesting enough on your site for it to matter anyway?
I love when I stumble upon personal websites from the old days (or not so old days), and I feel melancholy about them winking out of existence.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoI would also be interested in stats on eCommerce websites for businesses which have been shuttered. Wouldn't that be interesting if you could still shop there? When I played an MMOG, we had a very complex economic meta game, where you could purchase shops and stalls, and you could trade, buy, sell, and manufacture goods, you could store them, and you could ship them around the world. And players began to discover that they didn't necessarily need to micromanage, or even manage, their shops. They could set wages and prices in the spreadsheet, then toss millions of coin into the coffers, and then just let it run on auto-pilot. And then there were players who did this, and retired from the game, or they were even banned. Their properties weren't disabled in any way, IIRC, so as long as those shops had funds to pay the rent, they could attract traders and employees, and operate with impunity, and we began to call them "zombie shops". These zombie shops began to dominate the economy; even though the trade pricing was not optimal and they weren't being tweaked every day, they could easily absorb a lot of commerce, because there were a lot of them in the marketplace. So it was so frustrating to be an active business owner and competing against zombies! Of course, a real-life zombie eCommerce site would be more difficult to pull off, but perhaps not impossible, given the logistics of drop-shipping and automated payment processing. Consider a personal website, whose accounts have been prepaid well in advance, with future-proofed technology; it could be the next Energizer Bunny. Here's a Scavenger Hunt: what's the oldest extant personal website still running today? What's the oldest revision date on a website's page files? What's the oldest personal website where all functionality still remains?
- blustod 3y agoI wonder how long Let's Encrypt renewals will work on their own. Thinking of the oldest personal websites brings to mind the early web journalers around 1998 or so. I hadn't seen much of life and the world, so it was amazing to read about other people's lives. And there was controversy about whether they would get stalked. I believe everyone eventually got jobs and spouses and moved on because there wasn't a way to turn a little prominence into money. At the time, some of them talked like they were going to be famous pioneers. I suppose the entire early web is forgotten, beyond knowing that ebay and amazon and google date back to those days.
- nicbou 3y agoThis might be difficult because payment processors randomly expect work out of you. It might only happen once or twice a year, but it happens.
- LorenDB 3y agoI imagine a lot of people's websites would still be accessible indefinitely since they are hosted on GitHub Pages. A lot of others would probably expire within a month due to cloud hosting not being renewed or somebody saying "I think we can turn <person>'s PC/server/Pi off that's just sitting here in the corner. Of course, many sites would have domain names expiring within a year or two, although some people probably buy domains for longer billing cycles.
- blustod 3y ago[dead]
- randombits0 3y ago[flagged]
- orionblastar 3y agoConsider Michael David Crawford. His websites are offline a year after he died. Google has a new policy of deleting inactive accounts starting soon. So his emails will be lost unless someone knows his password. I told him to publish ebooks, but he wanted everything self hosted.
- mikewarot 3y agoMine would likely last a few months, but it's mostly old stuff anyway.
- anonymouscaller 3y agoI have my VPS on auto-renew, so I suppose until my credit card expires, the company goes out of business, or I run out of money in the bank.
- ksaj 3y agoMine is hosted on github, so I imagine it'll be around for quite a long time, so long as github outlasts me. However, the domain would expire, so you'd have to look at its raw html. I purposely write my content in Markdown for that reason. Some Internet archeologist might find it when I'm long gone, and in theory that part would still be legible.
- mattbgates 3y agoI register my domains for 10 years time and I try to keep a few months of funding in the VPS account, so hopefully a few months, but I wish it could last more. Some of the site will show up in Archive.org.
- ttymck 3y agoI guess until my credit cards expire or are closed. I hope my sites are being archived, but I've never confirmed, I think I'll do that now. Thanks for asking.
- KomoD 3y agoA year > Is the Internet Archive at least saving some of it for now? Probably. > Do you not keep anything interesting enough on your site for it to matter anyway? No
- nicbou 3y agoCertificates self-renew and the website itself is static. The nearest deadline would be the expiry of my credit card. Shortly after, the website would go down, then the CloudFlare cache would expire. One way around that would be to pump a lot of money into my DigitalOcean account, and if possible do the same with my domain registrar. The whole website is on The Internet Archive, and in the case of the website I live from, it's designed to be fully functional while archived. My personal website is on GitHub, so the markdown files would still be accessible and rendered properly by GitHub.