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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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.