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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?
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 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.