Slashdot Mirror
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?
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
That, and many more problems. A good friend and our main developer committed suicide 5 years ago.
With the ceremony, the emotional shock and many organizational problems, 1 month got by, the bank account got closed, the provider didn't get paid and deleted the whole VM on which our website was running.
During this period, 2 disks died at his place on the Raid 5 NAS backup, and nobody noticed.
When people tell me I'm being overzealous with backups now, I tell them that worst-worst-case scenarios do happen sometimes.
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.
. . . 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 . . .
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.
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.
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.
And thus my problem with this entire concept:
That's a lot of pissing about just to hold some old family photos and some broken HTML code on the Internet for a while.
Stop pissing about. The desire for you to be remembered for ever only resides with you, maybe your children, and - possibly - your grandchildren. Past that, nobody gives a shit at all. You could be the biggest celebrity in the world and nobody would care by the time it's your grandchild's time.
Name a grandchild of a famous dead person. Pretty much they have their own lives and don't want to live in their shadow all the time, or they go bankrupt trying.
Give it up. Print stuff off into a book or archive. Self-publish it and put a few copies around the family. Then forget about it and move on with your lives.
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
I thought I could connect with the world of living over the Ethernet but it appeared not to be what I hoped.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
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.)
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.
.... RAID is not a backup.
So I'll file a patent on it and make squillions!
Wrong.
7 billion people are alive. 108 billion people have existed. That means 101 billion have died.
That gives you a 94% chance of death and a 6% chance of immortality.
Next door neighbor has kept his deceased daughter's website an facebook pages alive. I reckon facebook will last a long long time.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
I'm not being an asshole here, but "worst case" literally means "it could actually happen".
If you explain it that way, it might help educate a few more people.
"Worst case, I lose a few quid down the loo." Well, do you have anything else in your pocket like a phone or I.D. or more quid? Because worst case could be really devastating.
Worst case is literally the worst thing that could happen within the realm of possibility. Meaning it is possible. Meaning you should try not to get to that point.
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
.... RAID is not a backup.
What a clueless thing to say. His setup was fine. You've misused the meme.
At a minimum, a proper backup strategy provides some level of protection against hardware failure and error propagation. RAID—by itself—provides no protection against error propagation, which is why we all chant that "RAID is not a backup", but it absolutely can be used as a part of a comprehensive backup strategy. Super trivial example: if you're even doing something simple like bringing a copy of the production data home periodically and loading it into a RAID you keep there (i.e. kinda like what it sounds like was going on here), that's sufficient to provide you with a degree of protection from error propagation (albeit, a thin one). A better solution might involve regular (e.g. every hour for the last day, every day for the last week, etc.) backups to an off-site RAID, since it would provide you with better protection against error propagation, as well as all of the protection against typical hardware failure that RAID provides, not to mention protection against at least some forms of disasters.
All of which is to say, "RAID is not a backup" is a shorthand way of telling people to not put their production data in a RAID and assume it's "backed up" when it's not. RAID may not not a backup, but it's an essential part of many organizational backup strategies, and if you're a small company, putting your production data in one place and using RAID for storing a backup at the home of your lead developer is a perfectly valid strategy.
You completely and utterly fail at both logic and reading comprehension.
Let me spell it out for you, because you are stupid:
No one who is currently alive has ever died. There are over 6 billion people living today, hence there are over 6 billion people who have never died.