8 ms·

WordPress introduces 100 year domain registrations

162 points by apitman 3y ago

throwaway751 3y ago
Wordpress has already been around one fifth of a century. Yet, it's quite something to appreciate the change that happened between the one tenth of a century before it, so, 1993, and it, so, 2003. In that time we went from self (and often university) hosted HTML to self-publishing. And it wasn't just Wordpress. A plethora of single-writer and group publishing flourished in an incredibly brief period of time powered in large part by the sudden availability of low priced (and free) hosting and scriptable languages. In comparison, the past 1/10th of a century has seen little. Choice of JS framework does not revolutionary change make. If anything, there's a now established no turning back movement from federalists, indeed a niche, a result of the swallowing creative and belching out stale innovation FAANGs+ have brought destructive force with. FB does nothing whatsoever now in social good that it didn't do a decade ago. Nor Google. Just as banks do good in facilitating individual with saving, loan and payment solutions, they get fucked up sometimes and in their chasing the last decimal point fuck up people's lives via markets; FAANGs are at the chasing the last decimal point in advertising but fucking up people's lives directly through their brains, and it's got a way to run. Which roundabout wandering brings me to ask: Will the $100 be put in trust, or similar, to ride out the next revolutionary change in tech that may result in Wordpress no longer be around but some cash needs to be left over for hosting something. The past decade has been all but revolutionary and is no place to base an assumption on the volatility-in-tech two decades down the line.
mjerryfuerst 3y ago
(1) I wonder if the economics of cemeteries would be useful in this discussion (2) How much disk space does one get of the $38K? One would think the pricing would be based upon diskspace used
dubcanada 3y ago
That kind of implies wordpress will last 100 years... Which is unlikely.
- 8organicbits 3y ago
  Seems likely to me. It's twenty years old and powers >40% of the internet. Old software that reaches that level of adoption for so long has great sticking power. Edit: I suppose the parent meant WordPress.com, the commercial organization that's making this offer, not the open source software itself. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress
  - hoofhearted 3y ago
    It’s like the Ford Edsel; WordPress is so wrapped up in their own technology and echo chamber that they won’t even see a better product coming to the market with features that customers are actually asking for. https://github.com/elegantframework/elegant-cli https://github.com/elegantframework/elegant-cli
    - withinboredom 3y ago
      You're assuming that people want a static site. WordPress isn't just static sites.
      - hoofhearted 3y ago
        It’s not about being a static website. It’s about using the latest cutting edge technology to build the best possible web application for uses. “Best” as in; Perfect SEO, Simple theming, Fastest loading possible, Secure, Simple and affordable hosting, and so on. WordPress is very dated, and they are very comfortable in their niche. The reason they maintain the market share that they do is because there just isn’t a better option for users currently. But to address your static comment; It in my opinion that most most blog sites store static text that never changes in a database, and a backend server has to query for data and return it to the frontend. This workflow seems a bit overly complex when I could just store the text in a document, and eliminate the need for a backend server or database. The internet as we know it was created so that CERN could share static text documents with others. Why don’t we bring the web back to that?
yellow_lead 3y ago
Does anyone trust them to maintain these for 100 years? This is a money grab - "Pay us up front for 100 years of service." No doubt the terms will include plenty of wiggleroom for the company to backtrack on these promises. * we maintain multiple backups of your content across geographically distributed data center * 24/7 Premier Support * The very best managed WordPress experience with unmetered bandwidth, best-in-class speed, and unstoppable security bundled in one convenient package.
- robjan 3y ago
  They own .blog so I am guessing they can at least keep that part of the bargain. As to what level of service they can maintain over 100 years, or whether the web as we know it will continue to exist, remains to be seen.
  - unnouinceput 3y ago
    just like unlimited yahoo mail space, or google's unlimited email space or that airline from 80's that took back through technicalities the "lifetime" ticket, no? I would not trust anything that's long term more than 10 years, and even that is a stretch. I agree with GP, it's a cash grab.
    - xcdzvyn 3y ago
      All of those services maintain a clause stating they can revoke that "unlimited" service at-will. I doubt that's the case here.
    - readams 3y ago
      Google never had unlimited email space. They launched at 1GB (which seemed huge) and increased it over the years, but it was never unlimited.
      - codeulike 3y ago
        They marketed it at the time as being "unlimited", which at the time was a reasonably fair description
ez_mmk 3y ago
[flagged]
- mattl 3y ago
  Why? WordPress is a great project that has been around for twenty years already.
  - ez_mmk 3y ago
    every great thing must come to an end
- acheron 3y ago
  https://abstrusegoose.com/323 https://abstrusegoose.com/323
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
cateye 3y ago
I have not read it very carefully, but couldn't spot price information. Without any indication, the whole question whether someone is interested becomes a little meaningless.
- Matl 3y ago
  The cost of the 100 year domain name registration is $38,000 USD. That works out to $380 per year for hosting and domain registration. Source: [1] 1 - https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-100-year-domain-name-registrations/494878 https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-100-year-domai...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
layer8 3y ago
And it’s only $380 per year: https://wordpress.com/100-year/ https://wordpress.com/100-year/ With inflation, that may almost end up being a fair deal. ($380 in 2023 was about $24 in 1923.)
- goykasi 3y ago
  That's insanity. I would rather bet on Cloudflare to be around longer. They don't add any additional up-charge from the baseline ICANN price. Before, I was buying 10 years of registration for a bit of a discount, but, after 20 years, I've switched over to single year with CF. What value does Wordpress bring for $380/yr? That's crazy.
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    You don't think Cloudflare will have a vc catchup moment where they jack up prices when they have a certain reach? Or they won't get purchased by a bigger entity or the US military? Cloudflare will not be the same in 10 years. I doubt it will exist as the cloudflare we know today.
    - superq 3y ago
      Cloudflare is a publicly traded company with a current market cap of $18.2B.
    - goykasi 3y ago
      > I doubt it will exist as the cloudflare we know today Well, I can't predict the future, but I think CF is one of the good ones. I bet on them more than most. They have been pretty consistent with being benevolent for the internet. But you seem to feel differently. Have they rubbed you the wrong way somehow? Why would they allow the US military to buy them out?
- 542458 3y ago
  I don’t think the price is particularly good. Even if we value the domain at $30 per year, that still leaves $350 per year for hosting and support. I’d expect to be able to host a bunch of century Wordpress sites for very very cheaply, provided you locked down plugin installation (I don’t see how third party plugins could possibly work on sites expected to be that long-lived). Without plugins they’re a known security and upgrade profile, and I expect traffic on 99.95% of them to be effectively nil or highly cacheable. Support is a bit harder to quantify, but I still would expect that most sites will just quietly chug along and support events will be rare (and again, you’re supporting a very well-known software profile). To that end the price feels a bit outlandish to me.
petarb 3y ago
The new annual plan, 100 years. Sign up monthly or centurly
asicsp 3y ago
Dupe? https://wordpress.com/100-year/ https://wordpress.com/100-year/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37271764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37271764 (74 points | 1 day ago | 111 comments)
Ayesh 3y ago
It's $38K for 100 years. Because WordPress.com is the .blog registry, I guess they could pull it off for .blog domains. Other tld registries have bitten dust already, and other registries have jacked up prices in the previous years. But even at a 10% increase a year (likely the case for .com), the domain renewals will cost about $5K for 100 years. With hosting, support, and WordPress being able to run for 100 years, I think that price is justified. If ICANN screws WordPress, or whatever WordPress.com uses for hosting screws them, they will be in a mess.
- jeremyjh 3y ago
  Am I the only one horrified at the thought that people will still be using Wordpress in 100 years? I can't really imagine the world in which that happens, it has to have the kind of bleakness to it that in its own way surpasses cyberpunk dystopias.
  - ohgodplsno 3y ago
    Are you horrified at the idea that we still use screwdrivers when power tools exist ? Wordpress does the job. It's not particularly good at anything, but it works damn well. Wordpress is 40% of all sites in the world.
    - echelon 3y ago
      I'll be horrified if we're still using screwdrivers in 100 years. I'm ready for brain uploads and immortality and unlocking the rest of the galaxy for exploration. I'm tired of everyone turning to dust.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        Prepare for disappointment.
      - riffic 3y ago
        screwdrivers are a very good example of the Lindy effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
dbg31415 3y ago
This is what good marketing looks like. Look at all the people talking about this. And this is an excellent way for WordPress to talk about stability and disaster recovery... in ways that aren't nearly as boring as we've done in the past. It's just adding a human spin to why dev ops and infrastructure and security matters. =P "100 years" is a much better way of saying "5-9s!" Ha.
miragecraft 3y ago
Prepaying 100 years to secure your digital legacy hinges on the sad premise that no one else will bother to keep it going. Like a swan song that lasts way too long through sheer financial will.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  This is one of the major differences between digital and paper: digital requires constant upkeep. If you'd replace the inscriptions on pyrymids and obelisks as well as the various old documents with their digital equivalent we'd have lost them long ago. And they will still be there long after their current digital equivalents have turned to dust. The only defense that digital has is boundless copies, in the hope that some of them survive. But the chances of any particular copy surviving very long is nil and even if it does it is probably going to be unreadable so you need to keep copying.
  - miragecraft 3y ago
    We have the Internet Archive though, so you’re really just paying for search engine discoverability and… domain name squatting as a dead person. I’d bet that the Internet Archive will last longer than Wordpress as an organization.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      There are a lot of forces that would love to see the IA disappear. I wouldn't bet on them any more than I would on any other copy. If you really think something is worth preserving print it out on acid free paper or archival quality microfiche.
      - miragecraft 3y ago
        Those forces are not against the website preservation part of IA, only their “digital library” part where they provide access to copyrighted material for free. I seriously doubt even if IA lost a bunch of lawsuits would your archived website be in any danger, as there are many many interested parties (including nation states) who are keen to keep the archived websites from disappearing as they are an important public resource.
ck2 3y ago
I'd like to imagine we'd be domain-less in 100 years Obviously cannot envision what would replace it by then but our interfaces will be completely different, not just full effortless voice interaction with AI but probably gestures and anticipation analysis. Imagine the computing power in a penny sized node and the battery would be your body or radio frequency airwaves or solar or kinetics, everything it can absorb.
andrewmcwatters 3y ago
Or, you know, hold on to your $38K and let the interest pay your domain lease in perpetuity.
- brody_hamer 3y ago
  I expect $38k is enough to set up a proper trust to run indefinitely. I would assume that any company offering this sort of approach would have a trust set up to ensure it can keep its promise. (Ex: invest in S&P and draw off 3% each year to cover maintenance and upkeep) That’s how I would do it, at least. The fact that Wordpress doesn’t detail anything like this has me doubting though.
Waterluvian 3y ago
It’s just a money grab for anyone who will fall for it. 100 years is long enough that the consequences of failure are nil. Nobody who is pushing this program will be alive to deal with any fallout. It reminds me of the subtle attitude of people making poor engineering decisions because they’ll be long gone by the time payment comes due.
- bartvk 3y ago
  A money grab from the people of WordPress? The company that has probably done the most for the development of the web? I find it hard to see it that way.
  - moralestapia 3y ago
    > The company that has probably done the most for the development of the web? Lol, excuse me? I know WP is big but take a moment to reflect on that statement, WP is far from that.
    - redeeman 3y ago
      they have atleast ensured a great many people are dealing with regularly patching crap, and taking care of fallout, from what is arguably one of the most insecure piles of garbage EVER WRITTEN
  - naillo 3y ago
    This feels like bordering on flamebait
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - topato 3y ago
    I think this is supposed to be sarcastic
- anonzzzies 3y ago
  Almost all ‘lifetime subs’ are scams; a company has to be massive to support it and if it doesn’t work out for smaller companies, the consequences don’t matter anyway.
harshreality 3y ago
Things are not nearly as predictable 100 years out as they are 1 or 10. A 100-year plan is for WordPress.com's benefit, not yours. They get a predictable accounting revenue stream for 100 years if they continue to exist; if not, no problem for them, they still got the money, while you get nothing (or whatever a bankruptcy court says). You get... hosting for 100 years. Maybe. What are the odds, and are you factoring that into the price you pay? It reminds me of file locker sites' "lifetime subscriptions", which amount to however long they continue to operate before the owners lose interest in the hassle or get sued and have to shut down.
- josephcsible 3y ago
  > They get a predictable accounting revenue stream for 100 years Isn't this a one-time payment up front?
  - harshreality 3y ago
    Yeah, but the accounting for it would run the 100 years, presumably.
Daril 3y ago
I don't understand if this is a joke or a desperate attempt to collect money ... Tomorrow morning (like any other company of course) Wordpress could go bankrupt and they promise to guarantee the status quo for the next 100 years ... As someone who has just spent a week trying to integrate the Wordpress API into an external software, I really hoped that they would make an announcement that they have decided to fix all this incredible mess of many years old APIs, incredibly survived all the technological improvements and make a professional and exhaustive developer documentation ...
nottorp 3y ago
Customer lock in? Who owns the domain, the customer or wordpress? IMO never tie your domain registration to your hosting or any other service you run through that domain. You'll regret it as soon as you need to move something.
somenameforme 3y ago
$38k at 1% interest = $380 per year, forever. Current US Treasury rates are > 5%, meaning > $1900 per year. What is the overlap between people who have $38k disposable, don't realize this, and also think paying $38k for a Wordpress domain lease is a good idea? I can only assume this has to be some weird publicity stunt, which is probably quite clever, because here we are talking about Wordpress.
- donmcronald 3y ago
  It’s almost $2 million at 4% compounded annually. $80 million at 8%. Lmao.
- willcipriano 3y ago
  If inflation is persistent throughout the decade it might end up as a better deal but its a long shot for a small payoff.
  - eastbound 3y ago
    Re: An update about our Squatting Domains (formerly “Lifetime domains”) Dear valued customers, Due to unprecedented and frankly unforeseen inflation no really we couldn’t see that coming, we have decided that a small number of customers couldn’t be costing everyone else something, risking our whole company to go bankrupt, so we’ve decided to migrate every Squatting Domain to our new service at squatting.wordpress.com/[your account name]. Proud to offer the best customer service for a century!
mobilene 3y ago
After a frustrating incident long ago where my domain was registered at the same place that hosted my site -- and the host went dark -- I never register my domain with the same company that hosts my site. I'm on WordPress.com Business now, so no thanks to your offer, WordPress.
superq 3y ago
Wordpress is not public, but they want to IPO. Selling even a few of these at $38k each would massively increase profits, and give them a good story to tell investors.
skilled 3y ago
“Managed” hosting.. what is there to manage about a platform that rolls WordPress releases and doesn’t allow any critical customisations. I mean yeah… it would cost you like 10-15k if you did it any other way but 38k… please.
withinboredom 3y ago
Does this plan come with nearly a 100% churn rate?
alberth 3y ago
Ponzi Scheme Any “forever” or “unlimited” are forms of a Ponzi scheme. Note: I not saying Wordpress is being malicious. I’m just saying that for the economics of a “forever” or “unlimited” to work, you need to find new money to offset the old costs - and a lot of really good companies have had to learn this lesson the hard way.
- erikpukinskis 3y ago
  How is a finite number of years "forever"?
- FinnKuhn 3y ago
  this isn't "unlimited" or "forever" though. It is for the next 100 years.
- brightlancer 3y ago
  Lots of businesses require new money to offset old costs - that's not fraud. Companies also sell products and services below cost to build their brand and/or upsell the customers later. I don't know WP's cost breakdown, but registering and hosting domains is relatively inexpensive and will likely get (relatively) cheaper in later decades. Meanwhile, they have a customer locked in for 100 years who will have a sunk cost incentive to purchase new features through WP rather than setting up a new domain somewhere else.
Brajeshwar 3y ago
This is a nice gesture and I hope this really works out. However, one should keep in mind that things changes and be ready for that too. Here are two examples; Network Solutions 100-year domain registration[1][1a] and Evernote's 100-Year Plan[2][2a]. 1. https://www.networkworld.com/article/2332012/network-solutions-offers-100-year-domain-name-registrations.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/2332012/network-solutio... 1a. https://archive.ph/hpkn2 https://archive.ph/hpkn2 2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikeotoole/2014/11/13/evernote-and-the-100-year-business-plan-why-users-love-it-and-funders-hated-it/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikeotoole/2014/11/13/evernote-... 2a. https://archive.ph/43Dwr https://archive.ph/43Dwr
theanonymousone 3y ago
It seems I need to repeat myself[0] that: > This reminds me of a café in Lausanne that started operations by selling lifetime, three-coffees-per-month subscriptions, and then after a year or so "management changed" and they annulled all subscriptions :D
CM30 3y ago
Yeah, I doubt this is going to be hold for 100 years. WordPress itself? Maybe, it's certainly not the kind of software that goes out of fashion in a year or two like many frameworks of the day. But a paid service that's supposed to last 100 years (or heck, longer than 10 years in general) is very unlikely to stick around anywhere near as long as that. Something like 99% of companies will flat out not exist by the next century.
- ElFitz 3y ago
  A 100 years ago we didn’t have software. Oil was all the rage and had only started being massively available two decades ago. Ford had recently started. And IBM, then CTR, was just 12 years old. I wonder how things will look in another 100 years. Perhaps the web won’t have changed much. Perhaps the mere concept of a CMS or human-written software will be laughable. Unrelated, but funny enough to be worth mentioning, it appears IBM’s founder was the father of Fairchild Semi’s.
  - CM30 3y ago
    I forgot that Ford and IBM were 100+ years old. Huh, guess I can bring the list of companies I use that were around 100 years or more up to about 5 or 6 now. And yeah things were very different back then, and will be in future too. I don't personally think we're ever going to be in a situation where no human written software will exist though. Human creativity and the ability to do things better don't seem to have too much in common (people still paint despite photography existing, plays are still performed despite film and television and people still work on games and software for systems released in the 80s and 90s simply because they can). But it may be niche at least.
nicechianti 3y ago
[dead]
wrs 3y ago
This implies that WordPress has figured out how to guarantee their company will be alive and functional in 100 years. They should sell that as a service!
gdrhvvff 3y ago
[flagged]
_xivi 3y ago
According to W3techs, WordPress CMS usage & market share have stagnated lately (starting in 2022) and actually began to decline for the first time. This is a serious milestone, ending their sustained 10% growth streak that they have been riding for years. Inside the company, this must have raised red alarms and made them start looking for new plans. https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management/all/y https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_ma...
iguana_lawyer 3y ago
Optimistic to believe the internet, computers, or electric power will still exist in 100 years
duckfruit 3y ago
It’s a patently obvious money grab or scam or PR attempt because there’s no way in hell Wordpress will be around in 30 years let alone a hundred. But that got me thinking. Will the web itself be around a century from now? ICANN? HTML? HTTP? A hundred years ago there were no transatlantic flights. The television hadn’t been invented yet. What will the next hundred years bring? Kind of thought provoking really. Good weekend musings.
opwieurposiu 3y ago
Around 2002, there was a startup that funded itself by offering "lifetime" hosting for $500. I think it was called "textdrive". Anyway I bought it and it lasted about 8 years. The company went under or got bought out or something. Still not a bad price on a monthly basis. Anyway, If you get this, don't be surprised if it only lasts a decade or two.
tzs 3y ago
ICANN does not allow the expiration date on a domain registration to be more than 10 years in the future. Unless they made some special deal with ICANN, what Wordpress is almost certainly doing is the same thing Network Solutions does (or did? [1]) for their 100 year registration product. Register it for 10 years, and then add more years every so often over the next 100 years to keep pushing the expiration date out (but never farther out than 10 years) until the expiration date reaches 100 years from the start. [1] I'm not sure Network Solutions still offers 100 years. I just checked and it only offered up to 10 years for the domain itself. It offered up to 100 years on some of their add-ons such as their private registration option.
neilv 3y ago
I really don't like the idea of the lump sum for 100 years of service upfront. (Put loosely, what if they blow it all on executive bonuses the first few years of ramp-up, run out of suckers, and then have no funds to actually provide the service for the next 97 years. I'm not an accountant, but I'd guess not a lot of businesses would want to have 97 years of obligations without recurring revenue, and actually intending and able to honor those obligations.) What about treat it more like a life insurance policy: you pay monthly/yearly premiums as long as you're alive, and the "lifetime" only kicks in when you die? And the dotcom company covers the "lifetime" part with its own ample insurance, from some company that's been around since the figurative stone age, and won't likely fail until the next stone age? That spreads out recurring revenue for the company into something plausibly sustainable longer, increases the pool of sales prospects who could afford to buy into this (sales is a different matter), and increases the chance that this service will actually be provided in the end. (Assuming that they want this to work, and it's not a PR tactic to promote a visionary CEO image.)
qkhhly 3y ago
without any language specifying what would be their way to re-pay the customer in case of anything happens to prevent them from fulfilling the 100year contract, i would not pay a dime for this.

162 points by apitman 3y ago

Wordpress has already been around one fifth of a century. Yet, it's quite something to appreciate the change that happened between the one tenth of a century before it, so, 1993, and it, so, 2003. In that time we went from self (and often university) hosted HTML to self-publishing. And it wasn't just Wordpress. A plethora of single-writer and group publishing flourished in an incredibly brief period of time powered in large part by the sudden availability of low priced (and free) hosting and scriptable languages. In comparison, the past 1/10th of a century has seen little. Choice of JS framework does not revolutionary change make. If anything, there's a now established no turning back movement from federalists, indeed a niche, a result of the swallowing creative and belching out stale innovation FAANGs+ have brought destructive force with. FB does nothing whatsoever now in social good that it didn't do a decade ago. Nor Google. Just as banks do good in facilitating individual with saving, loan and payment solutions, they get fucked up sometimes and in their chasing the last decimal point fuck up people's lives via markets; FAANGs are at the chasing the last decimal point in advertising but fucking up people's lives directly through their brains, and it's got a way to run. Which roundabout wandering brings me to ask: Will the $100 be put in trust, or similar, to ride out the next revolutionary change in tech that may result in Wordpress no longer be around but some cash needs to be left over for hosting something. The past decade has been all but revolutionary and is no place to base an assumption on the volatility-in-tech two decades down the line.

mjerryfuerst 3y ago

(1) I wonder if the economics of cemeteries would be useful in this discussion (2) How much disk space does one get of the $38K? One would think the pricing would be based upon diskspace used

dubcanada 3y ago

That kind of implies wordpress will last 100 years... Which is unlikely.

8organicbits 3y ago
Seems likely to me. It's twenty years old and powers >40% of the internet. Old software that reaches that level of adoption for so long has great sticking power. Edit: I suppose the parent meant WordPress.com, the commercial organization that's making this offer, not the open source software itself. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress
- hoofhearted 3y ago
  It’s like the Ford Edsel; WordPress is so wrapped up in their own technology and echo chamber that they won’t even see a better product coming to the market with features that customers are actually asking for. https://github.com/elegantframework/elegant-cli https://github.com/elegantframework/elegant-cli
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    You're assuming that people want a static site. WordPress isn't just static sites.
    - hoofhearted 3y ago
      It’s not about being a static website. It’s about using the latest cutting edge technology to build the best possible web application for uses. “Best” as in; Perfect SEO, Simple theming, Fastest loading possible, Secure, Simple and affordable hosting, and so on. WordPress is very dated, and they are very comfortable in their niche. The reason they maintain the market share that they do is because there just isn’t a better option for users currently. But to address your static comment; It in my opinion that most most blog sites store static text that never changes in a database, and a backend server has to query for data and return it to the frontend. This workflow seems a bit overly complex when I could just store the text in a document, and eliminate the need for a backend server or database. The internet as we know it was created so that CERN could share static text documents with others. Why don’t we bring the web back to that?

yellow_lead 3y ago

Does anyone trust them to maintain these for 100 years? This is a money grab - "Pay us up front for 100 years of service." No doubt the terms will include plenty of wiggleroom for the company to backtrack on these promises. * we maintain multiple backups of your content across geographically distributed data center * 24/7 Premier Support * The very best managed WordPress experience with unmetered bandwidth, best-in-class speed, and unstoppable security bundled in one convenient package.

robjan 3y ago
They own .blog so I am guessing they can at least keep that part of the bargain. As to what level of service they can maintain over 100 years, or whether the web as we know it will continue to exist, remains to be seen.
- unnouinceput 3y ago
  just like unlimited yahoo mail space, or google's unlimited email space or that airline from 80's that took back through technicalities the "lifetime" ticket, no? I would not trust anything that's long term more than 10 years, and even that is a stretch. I agree with GP, it's a cash grab.
  - xcdzvyn 3y ago
    All of those services maintain a clause stating they can revoke that "unlimited" service at-will. I doubt that's the case here.
  - readams 3y ago
    Google never had unlimited email space. They launched at 1GB (which seemed huge) and increased it over the years, but it was never unlimited.
    - codeulike 3y ago
      They marketed it at the time as being "unlimited", which at the time was a reasonably fair description

ez_mmk 3y ago

[flagged]

mattl 3y ago
Why? WordPress is a great project that has been around for twenty years already.
- ez_mmk 3y ago
  every great thing must come to an end
acheron 3y ago
https://abstrusegoose.com/323 https://abstrusegoose.com/323
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

cateye 3y ago

I have not read it very carefully, but couldn't spot price information. Without any indication, the whole question whether someone is interested becomes a little meaningless.

Matl 3y ago
The cost of the 100 year domain name registration is $38,000 USD. That works out to $380 per year for hosting and domain registration. Source: [1] 1 - https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-100-year-domain-name-registrations/494878 https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-100-year-domai...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

layer8 3y ago

And it’s only $380 per year: https://wordpress.com/100-year/ https://wordpress.com/100-year/ With inflation, that may almost end up being a fair deal. ($380 in 2023 was about $24 in 1923.)

goykasi 3y ago
That's insanity. I would rather bet on Cloudflare to be around longer. They don't add any additional up-charge from the baseline ICANN price. Before, I was buying 10 years of registration for a bit of a discount, but, after 20 years, I've switched over to single year with CF. What value does Wordpress bring for $380/yr? That's crazy.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  You don't think Cloudflare will have a vc catchup moment where they jack up prices when they have a certain reach? Or they won't get purchased by a bigger entity or the US military? Cloudflare will not be the same in 10 years. I doubt it will exist as the cloudflare we know today.
  - superq 3y ago
    Cloudflare is a publicly traded company with a current market cap of $18.2B.
  - goykasi 3y ago
    > I doubt it will exist as the cloudflare we know today Well, I can't predict the future, but I think CF is one of the good ones. I bet on them more than most. They have been pretty consistent with being benevolent for the internet. But you seem to feel differently. Have they rubbed you the wrong way somehow? Why would they allow the US military to buy them out?
542458 3y ago
I don’t think the price is particularly good. Even if we value the domain at $30 per year, that still leaves $350 per year for hosting and support. I’d expect to be able to host a bunch of century Wordpress sites for very very cheaply, provided you locked down plugin installation (I don’t see how third party plugins could possibly work on sites expected to be that long-lived). Without plugins they’re a known security and upgrade profile, and I expect traffic on 99.95% of them to be effectively nil or highly cacheable. Support is a bit harder to quantify, but I still would expect that most sites will just quietly chug along and support events will be rare (and again, you’re supporting a very well-known software profile). To that end the price feels a bit outlandish to me.

petarb 3y ago

The new annual plan, 100 years. Sign up monthly or centurly

asicsp 3y ago

Dupe? https://wordpress.com/100-year/ https://wordpress.com/100-year/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37271764 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37271764 (74 points | 1 day ago | 111 comments)

Ayesh 3y ago

It's $38K for 100 years. Because WordPress.com is the .blog registry, I guess they could pull it off for .blog domains. Other tld registries have bitten dust already, and other registries have jacked up prices in the previous years. But even at a 10% increase a year (likely the case for .com), the domain renewals will cost about $5K for 100 years. With hosting, support, and WordPress being able to run for 100 years, I think that price is justified. If ICANN screws WordPress, or whatever WordPress.com uses for hosting screws them, they will be in a mess.

jeremyjh 3y ago
Am I the only one horrified at the thought that people will still be using Wordpress in 100 years? I can't really imagine the world in which that happens, it has to have the kind of bleakness to it that in its own way surpasses cyberpunk dystopias.
- ohgodplsno 3y ago
  Are you horrified at the idea that we still use screwdrivers when power tools exist ? Wordpress does the job. It's not particularly good at anything, but it works damn well. Wordpress is 40% of all sites in the world.
  - echelon 3y ago
    I'll be horrified if we're still using screwdrivers in 100 years. I'm ready for brain uploads and immortality and unlocking the rest of the galaxy for exploration. I'm tired of everyone turning to dust.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Prepare for disappointment.
    - riffic 3y ago
      screwdrivers are a very good example of the Lindy effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

dbg31415 3y ago

This is what good marketing looks like. Look at all the people talking about this. And this is an excellent way for WordPress to talk about stability and disaster recovery... in ways that aren't nearly as boring as we've done in the past. It's just adding a human spin to why dev ops and infrastructure and security matters. =P "100 years" is a much better way of saying "5-9s!" Ha.

miragecraft 3y ago

Prepaying 100 years to secure your digital legacy hinges on the sad premise that no one else will bother to keep it going. Like a swan song that lasts way too long through sheer financial will.

jacquesm 3y ago
This is one of the major differences between digital and paper: digital requires constant upkeep. If you'd replace the inscriptions on pyrymids and obelisks as well as the various old documents with their digital equivalent we'd have lost them long ago. And they will still be there long after their current digital equivalents have turned to dust. The only defense that digital has is boundless copies, in the hope that some of them survive. But the chances of any particular copy surviving very long is nil and even if it does it is probably going to be unreadable so you need to keep copying.
- miragecraft 3y ago
  We have the Internet Archive though, so you’re really just paying for search engine discoverability and… domain name squatting as a dead person. I’d bet that the Internet Archive will last longer than Wordpress as an organization.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    There are a lot of forces that would love to see the IA disappear. I wouldn't bet on them any more than I would on any other copy. If you really think something is worth preserving print it out on acid free paper or archival quality microfiche.
    - miragecraft 3y ago
      Those forces are not against the website preservation part of IA, only their “digital library” part where they provide access to copyrighted material for free. I seriously doubt even if IA lost a bunch of lawsuits would your archived website be in any danger, as there are many many interested parties (including nation states) who are keen to keep the archived websites from disappearing as they are an important public resource.

ck2 3y ago

I'd like to imagine we'd be domain-less in 100 years Obviously cannot envision what would replace it by then but our interfaces will be completely different, not just full effortless voice interaction with AI but probably gestures and anticipation analysis. Imagine the computing power in a penny sized node and the battery would be your body or radio frequency airwaves or solar or kinetics, everything it can absorb.

andrewmcwatters 3y ago

Or, you know, hold on to your $38K and let the interest pay your domain lease in perpetuity.

brody_hamer 3y ago
I expect $38k is enough to set up a proper trust to run indefinitely. I would assume that any company offering this sort of approach would have a trust set up to ensure it can keep its promise. (Ex: invest in S&P and draw off 3% each year to cover maintenance and upkeep) That’s how I would do it, at least. The fact that Wordpress doesn’t detail anything like this has me doubting though.

Waterluvian 3y ago

It’s just a money grab for anyone who will fall for it. 100 years is long enough that the consequences of failure are nil. Nobody who is pushing this program will be alive to deal with any fallout. It reminds me of the subtle attitude of people making poor engineering decisions because they’ll be long gone by the time payment comes due.

bartvk 3y ago
A money grab from the people of WordPress? The company that has probably done the most for the development of the web? I find it hard to see it that way.
- moralestapia 3y ago
  > The company that has probably done the most for the development of the web? Lol, excuse me? I know WP is big but take a moment to reflect on that statement, WP is far from that.
  - redeeman 3y ago
    they have atleast ensured a great many people are dealing with regularly patching crap, and taking care of fallout, from what is arguably one of the most insecure piles of garbage EVER WRITTEN
- naillo 3y ago
  This feels like bordering on flamebait
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- topato 3y ago
  I think this is supposed to be sarcastic
anonzzzies 3y ago
Almost all ‘lifetime subs’ are scams; a company has to be massive to support it and if it doesn’t work out for smaller companies, the consequences don’t matter anyway.

harshreality 3y ago

Things are not nearly as predictable 100 years out as they are 1 or 10. A 100-year plan is for WordPress.com's benefit, not yours. They get a predictable accounting revenue stream for 100 years if they continue to exist; if not, no problem for them, they still got the money, while you get nothing (or whatever a bankruptcy court says). You get... hosting for 100 years. Maybe. What are the odds, and are you factoring that into the price you pay? It reminds me of file locker sites' "lifetime subscriptions", which amount to however long they continue to operate before the owners lose interest in the hassle or get sued and have to shut down.

josephcsible 3y ago
> They get a predictable accounting revenue stream for 100 years Isn't this a one-time payment up front?
- harshreality 3y ago
  Yeah, but the accounting for it would run the 100 years, presumably.

Daril 3y ago

I don't understand if this is a joke or a desperate attempt to collect money ... Tomorrow morning (like any other company of course) Wordpress could go bankrupt and they promise to guarantee the status quo for the next 100 years ... As someone who has just spent a week trying to integrate the Wordpress API into an external software, I really hoped that they would make an announcement that they have decided to fix all this incredible mess of many years old APIs, incredibly survived all the technological improvements and make a professional and exhaustive developer documentation ...

nottorp 3y ago

Customer lock in? Who owns the domain, the customer or wordpress? IMO never tie your domain registration to your hosting or any other service you run through that domain. You'll regret it as soon as you need to move something.

somenameforme 3y ago

$38k at 1% interest = $380 per year, forever. Current US Treasury rates are > 5%, meaning > $1900 per year. What is the overlap between people who have $38k disposable, don't realize this, and also think paying $38k for a Wordpress domain lease is a good idea? I can only assume this has to be some weird publicity stunt, which is probably quite clever, because here we are talking about Wordpress.

donmcronald 3y ago
It’s almost $2 million at 4% compounded annually. $80 million at 8%. Lmao.
willcipriano 3y ago
If inflation is persistent throughout the decade it might end up as a better deal but its a long shot for a small payoff.
- eastbound 3y ago
  Re: An update about our Squatting Domains (formerly “Lifetime domains”) Dear valued customers, Due to unprecedented and frankly unforeseen inflation no really we couldn’t see that coming, we have decided that a small number of customers couldn’t be costing everyone else something, risking our whole company to go bankrupt, so we’ve decided to migrate every Squatting Domain to our new service at squatting.wordpress.com/[your account name]. Proud to offer the best customer service for a century!

mobilene 3y ago

After a frustrating incident long ago where my domain was registered at the same place that hosted my site -- and the host went dark -- I never register my domain with the same company that hosts my site. I'm on WordPress.com Business now, so no thanks to your offer, WordPress.

superq 3y ago

Wordpress is not public, but they want to IPO. Selling even a few of these at $38k each would massively increase profits, and give them a good story to tell investors.

skilled 3y ago

“Managed” hosting.. what is there to manage about a platform that rolls WordPress releases and doesn’t allow any critical customisations. I mean yeah… it would cost you like 10-15k if you did it any other way but 38k… please.

withinboredom 3y ago

Does this plan come with nearly a 100% churn rate?

alberth 3y ago

Ponzi Scheme Any “forever” or “unlimited” are forms of a Ponzi scheme. Note: I not saying Wordpress is being malicious. I’m just saying that for the economics of a “forever” or “unlimited” to work, you need to find new money to offset the old costs - and a lot of really good companies have had to learn this lesson the hard way.

erikpukinskis 3y ago
How is a finite number of years "forever"?
FinnKuhn 3y ago
this isn't "unlimited" or "forever" though. It is for the next 100 years.
brightlancer 3y ago
Lots of businesses require new money to offset old costs - that's not fraud. Companies also sell products and services below cost to build their brand and/or upsell the customers later. I don't know WP's cost breakdown, but registering and hosting domains is relatively inexpensive and will likely get (relatively) cheaper in later decades. Meanwhile, they have a customer locked in for 100 years who will have a sunk cost incentive to purchase new features through WP rather than setting up a new domain somewhere else.

Brajeshwar 3y ago

This is a nice gesture and I hope this really works out. However, one should keep in mind that things changes and be ready for that too. Here are two examples; Network Solutions 100-year domain registration[1][1a] and Evernote's 100-Year Plan[2][2a]. 1. https://www.networkworld.com/article/2332012/network-solutions-offers-100-year-domain-name-registrations.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/2332012/network-solutio... 1a. https://archive.ph/hpkn2 https://archive.ph/hpkn2 2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikeotoole/2014/11/13/evernote-and-the-100-year-business-plan-why-users-love-it-and-funders-hated-it/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikeotoole/2014/11/13/evernote-... 2a. https://archive.ph/43Dwr https://archive.ph/43Dwr

theanonymousone 3y ago

It seems I need to repeat myself[0] that: > This reminds me of a café in Lausanne that started operations by selling lifetime, three-coffees-per-month subscriptions, and then after a year or so "management changed" and they annulled all subscriptions :D

CM30 3y ago

Yeah, I doubt this is going to be hold for 100 years. WordPress itself? Maybe, it's certainly not the kind of software that goes out of fashion in a year or two like many frameworks of the day. But a paid service that's supposed to last 100 years (or heck, longer than 10 years in general) is very unlikely to stick around anywhere near as long as that. Something like 99% of companies will flat out not exist by the next century.

ElFitz 3y ago
A 100 years ago we didn’t have software. Oil was all the rage and had only started being massively available two decades ago. Ford had recently started. And IBM, then CTR, was just 12 years old. I wonder how things will look in another 100 years. Perhaps the web won’t have changed much. Perhaps the mere concept of a CMS or human-written software will be laughable. Unrelated, but funny enough to be worth mentioning, it appears IBM’s founder was the father of Fairchild Semi’s.
- CM30 3y ago
  I forgot that Ford and IBM were 100+ years old. Huh, guess I can bring the list of companies I use that were around 100 years or more up to about 5 or 6 now. And yeah things were very different back then, and will be in future too. I don't personally think we're ever going to be in a situation where no human written software will exist though. Human creativity and the ability to do things better don't seem to have too much in common (people still paint despite photography existing, plays are still performed despite film and television and people still work on games and software for systems released in the 80s and 90s simply because they can). But it may be niche at least.

nicechianti 3y ago

[dead]

wrs 3y ago

This implies that WordPress has figured out how to guarantee their company will be alive and functional in 100 years. They should sell that as a service!

gdrhvvff 3y ago

[flagged]

_xivi 3y ago

According to W3techs, WordPress CMS usage & market share have stagnated lately (starting in 2022) and actually began to decline for the first time. This is a serious milestone, ending their sustained 10% growth streak that they have been riding for years. Inside the company, this must have raised red alarms and made them start looking for new plans. https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management/all/y https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_ma...

iguana_lawyer 3y ago

Optimistic to believe the internet, computers, or electric power will still exist in 100 years

duckfruit 3y ago

It’s a patently obvious money grab or scam or PR attempt because there’s no way in hell Wordpress will be around in 30 years let alone a hundred. But that got me thinking. Will the web itself be around a century from now? ICANN? HTML? HTTP? A hundred years ago there were no transatlantic flights. The television hadn’t been invented yet. What will the next hundred years bring? Kind of thought provoking really. Good weekend musings.

opwieurposiu 3y ago

Around 2002, there was a startup that funded itself by offering "lifetime" hosting for $500. I think it was called "textdrive". Anyway I bought it and it lasted about 8 years. The company went under or got bought out or something. Still not a bad price on a monthly basis. Anyway, If you get this, don't be surprised if it only lasts a decade or two.

tzs 3y ago

ICANN does not allow the expiration date on a domain registration to be more than 10 years in the future. Unless they made some special deal with ICANN, what Wordpress is almost certainly doing is the same thing Network Solutions does (or did? [1]) for their 100 year registration product. Register it for 10 years, and then add more years every so often over the next 100 years to keep pushing the expiration date out (but never farther out than 10 years) until the expiration date reaches 100 years from the start. [1] I'm not sure Network Solutions still offers 100 years. I just checked and it only offered up to 10 years for the domain itself. It offered up to 100 years on some of their add-ons such as their private registration option.

neilv 3y ago

I really don't like the idea of the lump sum for 100 years of service upfront. (Put loosely, what if they blow it all on executive bonuses the first few years of ramp-up, run out of suckers, and then have no funds to actually provide the service for the next 97 years. I'm not an accountant, but I'd guess not a lot of businesses would want to have 97 years of obligations without recurring revenue, and actually intending and able to honor those obligations.) What about treat it more like a life insurance policy: you pay monthly/yearly premiums as long as you're alive, and the "lifetime" only kicks in when you die? And the dotcom company covers the "lifetime" part with its own ample insurance, from some company that's been around since the figurative stone age, and won't likely fail until the next stone age? That spreads out recurring revenue for the company into something plausibly sustainable longer, increases the pool of sales prospects who could afford to buy into this (sales is a different matter), and increases the chance that this service will actually be provided in the end. (Assuming that they want this to work, and it's not a PR tactic to promote a visionary CEO image.)

qkhhly 3y ago

without any language specifying what would be their way to re-pay the customer in case of anything happens to prevent them from fulfilling the 100year contract, i would not pay a dime for this.