Ask HN: Best way to keep a legacy website? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best way to keep a legacy website?

8 pointslogicallee16 comments

I currently pay for my own domain, which will expire after some time. What's the best way to maintain a legacy website forever? (i.e. after death.) I've lost contact with some of my family so I can't expect someone else to do it for me. The goal would be for it to remain online indefinitely.

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I guess the standard answer would be a foundation. In some countries, there are minimum capital requirements for foundations but I don't think it's the case for the US. So some thousands of dollars should be enough to keep a website running forever and also hire web developers and accountants every now and then to maintain it.

I would have thought there is a standard solution, a lot of people want to keep web sites active indefinitely, it is a common use case. I feel like setting up my own foundation would be attempting to re-invent the wheel.

Setting up a trust is more common than a foundation. But the concept is similar - you create a legal entity that will use your estate's resources to carry on whatever work you direct it to. You will appoint a trustee to take over the work when you die, and it will all be put together by an attorney into legal documentation that is filed with your local governments.

It will cost you a few thousand dollars for the legal work, and significantly more if you want it to last forever, as you need to fund it with enough money that it will not run out.

But I'm not sure keeping a web site alive forever is actually a common use case. That would be an interesting question to ask your attorney when you hire one.

If it's a set of unchanging static pages, making sure it's part of archive.org might be the best way.

Put it on the Way Back Machine. Print out a few copies and leave it with a trust of some sort.

Forever is a long time. Indefinite is easy though. Find a company that will accept a deposit for future services, and bonus if they can accept third party deposits to fund your account in the future. Include information about adding funds somewhere and hope someone will find it and pay for it after you stop.

It will go offline at some point in the future, but since you don't know when, it's indefinite.

Could be when the money runs out (but costs may go up or down), or when the hosting company goes out of business, or stops providing this service. Or if they decide to do a KYC check and can't contact you.

Interesting thought. I started self hosting a long time ago due to being censored. So my site runs local use a DNS redirection service. So all the files are on my local box, which I could give or leave to someone. But I do not have anyone in my family with any kind of tech skills.

If you keep it clean HTML/CSS, they could just click index files, I suppose.

This is my site mad on Linux/Markdown, with bash scripts.

http://crn.hopto.org

I'd be curious about this:

>I started self hosting a long time ago due to being censored

I was just at an anti-censorship protest the other day.

Could I call you by phone and you can tell me about your experience? Please reply with your phone number here if we could chat about it.

[flagged]

Can you explain why you're unwilling to give a telephone interview about this? Censorship is a very serious issue unbecoming of America. I agree there is heavy censorship and I would like to interview you about it. You could also join a class-action lawsuit. I urge you to consider giving me an interview. Best regards, Robert Viragh

I have no interest in the lawsuit, I don't do interviews. If you want information about me an such, just read the site. That is all, good day.

okay, thank you for your statement all the same. Have a nice day.

If it's a SaaS, online indefinitely is impossible. Even if it has enough paying users, you have to maintain the service quality to reduce churn. You will eventually need someone to renew the domain and resolve any payment issues. But that means you need someone else to do it then.

Could this be a peer-to-peer problem? What if we have a distributed way of hosting and maintaining domains for legacy websites? It would be an interesting experiment.

You're right, a peer to peer solution would work. A Bittorrent can be online indefinitely. They are a bit hard to find, though, and would have to rely on a search website for discovery. Regarding renewing the domain and resolving any payment issues, that's exactly what I was asking about with my question. There must be some standard solution.

If its a frontend/content-only site (no backend logic), there is a way!

Its very different to what others will suggest, but it will cost nothing and is easy to do.

Convert the HTML/CSS/JS bundle into a base64 url

If it fits in that scheme, the base64 url can basically act as a hash for the website.

As the long as that base64 url is saved somewhere, you can run the site by pasting it into the url bar.

Then its just a question of storage

- Internet archive

- Hard-drives

etc

ipfs

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