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The Challenge of Web Hosting Once You're Dead
reifman writes: Hosting a website (even WordPress) after your death has a variety of unexpected complexities, from renewing your domain name, to hosting, security, monitoring, troubleshooting and more. It's a gaping hole that we as technologists should start thinking more about — especially because all of us are going to die, some of us unexpectedly sooner than we'd like or planned for. The only real solution I found was to share credentials and designate funds to descendants — you've done this, right?
It used to be you look for dead people to steal identities from by pretending they're still alive.
After the 'dead hosting' problem is taken care of, it will be 'pretend the owner is dead and take control'
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
I'll be dead, so it won't matter to me.
What do you do with an old website that you're not adding new content and tired of keeping up with the endless WordPress updates, spam comments and nonexistent traffic?
How would the domain be renewed if the estate cancels the credit cards?
How can I post inane details of my (after) life on twitter when I'm dead?
A fate worse than death.
Why would I care what happens??
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Same as with real property (house, boat, business office complex, etc.). A trust account, a trustee, and the keys in escrow (envelope in a box at the bank or the lawyers office).
And nobody cares about their websites either. Why is narcissim on a grand scale a virtue, while the practice of pedophilia in the privacy of your own home frowned on? I ask you, isn't nature ready to admit that propogation of DNA via random collapsing of probabilty functions a quaint but failed experiment?
The legal entity side where you the person who paid for the service is now deceased is a small part of the problem. Once the credit card company knows you're dead, so are your cards. Then you need to figure out how to get the service provider to change payment method without them realizing that the person who's name is on the account is deceased. If you care so much about this scenario, your best bet is to form some form of LLC that itself owns the domain, service contracts, etc. Make your executor/spouse/meaningful person a signing officer. This has the added benefit of skipping over probate issues as well.
The bigger issue is the content/tech side. All sites need maintenance. All service providers eventually go out of business or get acquired. Bit rot is a thing. Your best bet for future-proofing is to either publish static HTML, or have a backup that can be published as static html after the fact. Either way, you really need to have a designated geek to help finish your affairs.
And, after all that, you still need to figure out how to pay for the hosting perpetually. Maybe directing an annuity to be established is the right thing? No idea.
With all that said, sometimes its nice to leave a legacy. E.g. http://www.penmachine.com/
The first thing to consider is the web itself is less than 100 years old, and unlikely to still be there in 100 years. If you are willing to postulate the web, there are a number of strategies to be considered, and a good approach would be to use as many of them as possible.
1. Host on a free service, like blogger. You don't have DNS, you are costing them almost nothing, your blog will remain as long as their company/business model survives. Find as many of these services as you can, and replicate content. This is probably the best case scenario.
2. Host a website on Amazon's S3, and prepay. Cost of s3 is very low, one hundred dollars would keep a low traffic site running for a long time. And you should use their default URL. Again, no DNS issues.
3. Write malware that distributes your content to existing websites. You'd need some automated method of acquiring exploits though. That would be difficult.
4. Make sure you have a payment system that will keep running. This has been shown to work before: http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/07/us/michigan-mummified-body-found/ Use this as a backup to keep any paid websites, DNS, etc. Still running.
5. Create a trust. Hire a law firm to administer the trust. Put enough money in it, and it can hire people that will keep the site running.
I upload my legacy and let the world mirror it.
Anybody want to beta the solutions?
. . . and the world will keep your content available. The works of Shakespeare are still around, and lots of lesser writers as well.
Not all are so interesting. So there is a market for companies that keep content available forever, for a suitable one-time fee. Similar to those frozen brains . . .
"especially because all of us are going to die"
Bit of a large assumption there...
There are likely some people already born who will never die. Their form might change.
Get a domain name for the family. Every member can have a subdomain under that domain name. Hand off care and feeding of the domain and the hosting to your successor well before you die, with instructions they do the same when the time comes.
It does mean you have to say good-bye to myfancyvanitydomainname.com, instead you get to use you.family.org. At the same time, this is exactly how DNS was designed to work.
Do you really need to bequeath your blog to your next of kin? If you're talking to your family about funds and credentials, you're telling them 'here, I expect you to keep spending money forever on pointless sentimentality'. Keep a backup of the content, that's all.
But don't get me wrong; we should all be ready for our inevitable demise. I can't overestimate how important it is to prepare a will, insurance, a small untraceable account and a few years of queued posts offering a food tour of the afterlife.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Why the hell should I care?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Get a lawyer.
Get him/her to setup a trust for that. Problem solves.
Seems like the sort of thing a trust/lawyer company would be good at. They can keep the bills paid, and hiring an IT person to fix anything that breaks. Probably cost a fortune though.
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
I've been dead since 2009 and I'm still posting Slashdot comments.
It's all about good planning.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Set up your family name as a corporation and ensure it's controlled by a trust of members in your immediate family that you can you know, trust.
Use the corporation to control all aspects of accounts and websites for individual members of the family. Then multiple people know account log in's. The corporation cannot die, but will live on and controlled by your family, thus all accounts are immortal and controlled easily.
Problem Fscking Solved.
This problem was solved a long time ago in Chicago. Just leave the password for the domain and your bank account with someone. Doesn't matter who you leave it with, you're dead.
You're dead? Host it on a zombie server.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I'm shocked. I'm sure there's SOMETHING in the GPL about not discriminating against fields of endeavour or something. Surely that means it must not be right that they can discriminate against the endeavours of the dead.
I'm going to have to stop developing in WordPress and switch to something less damn discriminatory.
Use a webhost that lets you pre-pay for service, and prepay for a bunch of it. Register the domains through that host too, and set them to autorenewal. This won't get you indefinite service, but it can get you quite some years, if the host remains in business. Also you might want a static HTML website rather than something that might need upgrades.
Nearlyfreespeech.net is an example of a host you can do that with. If you deposit, say, $500, they will keep hosting your website until you use up $500 worth of service, which for a modest static-HTML site with one domain should be many years.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
There are a lot of other things that are challenging once you're dead too, like brushing your teeth, combing your hair (and it's a real pain when it starts to fall out), and even scratching an itch. Being dead sucks, actually, and you'll have a lot more on your mind than keeping your WordPress site up to date!
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
... try editing your page after you're dead.
I assume that decomposition has a negative effect on your typing skills.
If it's that important and you have a partner in the endeavor, you make sure they have access.
If it's that important and you don't have a partner in the endeavor, you hire a lawyer.
QED
You all are making this more complex than it needs. Simply implement a "Next of Kin" system which requires public records of death along with death certificate to have the account released. Too easy. The real challenge will be introducing some sort of inheritance tax on digital assets.
http://www.mafiasecurity.com maf
If I'm self-hosting, then the server is in my house and belongs to me. As long as whoever is supposed to manage it after I'm gone is capable of using the operating system on said system, they should be able to reset my passwords after I'm gone and manage it by starting there.
Although really, if I'm dead, why would I care if anyone saw my web page? I've never had anything on my web server that was that important.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
In his book, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology Ray Kurzweil talks about the difficulties moving information from media to media as technology changes. He comes to the conclusion that information is only readily available when someone cares about it.
If you have enough money, [like other posters mentioned] you could setup a trust and have the executors required/compensated for taking an actions (such as keeping your online presence going after you die.)
Speak for your self.
More than 6 billion people have never died.
Personally I'll take my chances at living for ever.
please someone maintain my Myspace profile after I die. Thank you.
... it would already be on a non-personal site (Wikipedia, liveleaks, arxiv, etc.)
Otherwise it's best not to clutter the already cluttered net with more useless stuff. Let it 'age' out like any other good cache of once useful things that are no longer needed.
As a believer in presentism, I believe that your problem is unsolvable -- after you're dead, no matter how many preparations are made, there's no guarantee that your descendents will respect your wishes.
But, that said, best of luck trying. The pursuit of the unachievable, often leads to useful side effects.
Stop using that security nightmare.
PLEASE!
IE 6 and XP with pre service pack 2 had less security exploits for crying out loud. No IT professional should trust it as arstechnica and others have a 0 day posted every other month.
http://saveie6.com/
Have gnu, will travel.
I can't be the only one who thought of this precise example of a situation like this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Once I'm dead, what fucks do I give if my website or anything else is still around?
My wife did this as her thesis.
http://explorer.cyberstreet.co...
As an alternative to a trust incorporate the blog and leave a big enough balance in the corporation accounts to pay someone to maintain the site for a good while. If you have a board of directors for the corp, it is likley there will still be one director around who can restart the corp. (Perhaps as an LLC etc). This is the big advantage of a corporation in that it will survive the death of the main person if set up properly. corps are immortal.
Don't worry, the living will maintain it if it's worth the effort.
If you're famous enough, you'll have a wikipedia entry.
If not, well, that's it.
If you have relatives, they will remember you. If you have kids early enough and they also have kids early enough, your grandkids will remember you, too.
If not, maybe you should stop worrying about a f*cking website, for god's sake!
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
It's rather unlikely that I'll care what happens to my domain after I'm dead.
So, yeah, I have this plan to not die.
So far it's working!
Now really folks, aren't we taking ourselves too seriously here? Is there something you have to say that is so important you want it available for future generations? Think about the 101 billion who have already died- did lots of them have important things to say that we should be reading about now? Should they have left us a legacy web site?
If you have important wisdom to share, or even some really important facts and figures to impart; put them in a book. Publishers love to publish important stuff and most of them can distinguish 'important' from 'self-important'. Your legacy may last longer than the internet, maybe longer than humanity.
...omphaloskepsis often...
The Challenge of Web Hosting Once You're Dead
I clearly see it now, The Challenge of Web Hosting Once You're Dead, the occult aspect of it is clearly off topic. Thanks for clearing that up...
I propably no longer care about what happens to my website(s).
github?
I don't want to see dead people, all the time, not in real life nor in the digital one.
Can someone tell me how to keep my twitter account active after I die?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
... who the hell ceahs?!!
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
My employer delegated everything to a contractor, a company of one. He hosted the webmail on a commercial server. All the contacts for the domain name were him and one email address, as was the hosting account. Not a single Board Member was on any account.
One day he suffered an incapacitating stroke. He was an only child with an elderly mother who could not help us at all, not even with credit card or checking account numbers. No passwords were cached on his laptop. The guy was a hermit with no friends. We were locked out of everything, just waiting for accounts to expire.
I managed to get into the accounts with social engineering. I read everything about Captain Crunch, Cliff Stoll, Catch Me If You Can. It took about 5 months, but I saved everything, domain names, email, registry services.
Yes, it was a shitty Governing Board.
You know how we have found records from ancient Egypt and China and South America that are thousands of years old, enabling us to learn about those cultures? That won't happen with us. We store our records on fragile magnetic disks that require electricity and an extremely complex machine to read. No one wants to think that our civilization could end, but odds are it will at some point. I often wonder what future archaeologists will think about our civilization. What trace will we leave behind now that everything has gone digital?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
A good example of this is www.sheldonbrown.com
Sheldon Brown who died in 2008 was a very well know bicycle mechanic, writer, and collector. He had a lot of information about various interesting bicycle topics on hos web site. I believe he did not pass away suddenly and planned for his available web material to continue to be hosted on his domain.
If you're dead, you just do not care anymore.
While you're considering post-mortem hosting, you should also get your shit together.
Mom had a blog and a collection of around 80,000 digital photographs. After she died, I didn't have any good options for keeping any of it up. I mean yeah, she was my mother, but $120 a year in perpetuity to preserve her life's work? Not to mention various tech support providers were entirely unhelpful when I contacted them about transferring all her data to accounts I controlled.
I tried ripping a mirror of all that stuff to a local archive, but it proved to be a major challenge to grab full sized copies of all the images, and every single interconnected thing, without sucking in half the damn internet. My script blew out a 500 GB hard disk, and got my bandwidth throttled for a month, and still missed most of what I was trying to capture.
I had her original hard disk with the raw image files, and decided to settle for that. I had no record of which ones she hand picked, and no rhyme or reason to tens of thousands of files with random date-based names. I wanted to do a coffee table book or something--anything, really--but I never figured out what to do with any of that, and never got around to doing anything with it at all.
When the rent came due on the online stuff, I threw up my hands and pulled the plug on everything. I set the hard drive aside to do something with one of these days, but I lost track of which identical old drive was which, and accidentally formatted that one.
My mother was a very depressed, unhappy woman who drank herself to an early death. In the end, one of the things she lamented about most loudly was the fact that her life's work was nothing more than pixels. In a tragic turn of irony, she was exactly right about that. It fell on me to preserve her legacy, and I totally fucked it all up, and it's all gone. Poof. Literally the only thing I have to remind me that my mother used to exist is a print-out of one of her last emails, where she was telling some guy she knew what an asshole I am.
I guess she was right about that too. I fucked it all up, and what can I do about it now? Nothing.
There was a service called "psAfterlife" (spanish: https://www.fayerwayer.com/2011/07/psafterlife-un-servicio-para-comunicarse-despues-de-muerto-fw-startups/ and https://www.psafterlife.com/es/) which you subscribed so they managed your "digital heritage" after your death, forever. Ironically, I guess this service is no longer available so maybe it wasn't that good to profit from.
The problem of disappearing personal Web sites has been in the news a couple of times this week.
It seems like an obvious startup to guarantee viability of Web content after death for a fee. It seems pretty straightforward, except...
I assume there will be some law to define. For instance, does the company have the same rights as the deceased when it comes to asking/forcing Facebook to not delete their page/wall.
This sounds like a great business project, and a great career-maker for at least one lawyer.
-Todd
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.