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Is it possible to set up a website that will last for 100 years, paid in advance? Question
I've seen a lot of domain names expire or hosting go dark when a website owner stops maintaining the site.
Is there a way to prevent that for my own site? I'd like it to remain up, well after I'm gone. Is there a way to set up prepaid long-term domain registration and hosting? I'm thinking for 100 or even 1,000 years.
The goal is to keep the information around for a long time, not to generate income for a long time. Currently the hosting and domain name cost around $150 per year.
2 answers
Under ICANN rules, registrations are not allowed to be longer than a ten-year term. Some companies, most notably Network Solutions, offer a 100-year term when you buy a domain name, but as far as I can tell, this is really just doing a 10-year term which the company renews each subsequent decade. This might be exactly what you're looking for, but you're relying on the company remaining in business for that whole hundred years to actually renew it.
There's currently no technical solution to ensure a renewal term longer than ten years. The only way to ensure this happens would be to have an attorney establish a trust or similar legal entity with the responsibility and funds to continually renew the domain for many, many years.
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I don't think this is realistic.
- How many companies still honor contracts from 1923? There's no way to guarantee that it will survive through all the possible mergers, acquisitions, bankruptcies, wars, and countless others calamities.
- If you are doing periodic renewals, it would be difficult to set up a simple, "passive" way of storing the funds (consider inflation as well, or currency changes like Franc to Euro).
- Automated renewals would run into issues as the registrar's interface is bound to change.
- Web technologies will evolve and make your site unusable. For example, 20 years ago HTTP was largely acceptable. Today, browsers are beginning to even blanket-refuse non-TLS sites. In 2043, who knows what will change?
- Internet infrastructure may change too dramatically that a continuation of present day hosting arrangements will be impractical. For example, what if in 10 years everyone decides to start using Gemini instead? (They won't, but it's just an example)
- The internet may be replaced by some other network. For example, what if we start using wifi meshes instead of traditional internet infrastructure?
- It is very difficult to devise security measures that would be robust on such a long time. There is a high risk that after a while, hackers would use currently unknown exploits to take over your valuable domain and/or website.
I think your best bet would be to do what some private landmarks/museums do: Establish an estate/trust to provide funds, appoint some sort of officer (a lawyer) to periodically renew the domain, and possibly authorize him to hire IT professionals to update the website. All this will not be cheap, and you will have a good amount of work to do on writing instructions that are at least somewhat robust to the above risks, but if you really need the website to be up in 2123, I would say that this is the way.
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