

Ask HN: would you pay $2000 now to host forever? - jayzalowitz

Someone posted earlier today and asked how hard it would be to make sure a site was preserved forever.<p>I ran some quick numbers and $2000 seems to be about what you would need to keep an average website (www.aaronsw.com for example) and its contents up forever assuming base needs and bulk registration renewals.<p>Would anyone pay this?
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coryl
I would never pay a huge lump sum for a "forever" or "unlimited" service.
Nothing lasts forever, nothing is unlimited.

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johnfuller
One way you could do this and make it feasible to last forever would be to
form a non profit to take donations and volunteers, build a P2P system and get
enough of a fan base to keep it going. That way you would only need volunteers
to maintain the client software / protocols. The only cost would be the entry
point domain and the servers to keep the web presence going, though it's
possible you could find a hosting service which would donate the server space.
Donations should cover any other costs.

The sites would need to be static snapshots and piggy back off the main
domain. You could direct traffic from external domains, but those domains
would likely die at some point. Perhaps you could even partner with a DNS
service such as CloudFlare so that users could have an option to direct
traffic to your service when certain actions happen (site is down for a
certain amount of time.) The domain would still die eventually though, and the
links would go with it. Ultimately I'm not sure that losing links would be a
big deal anyways, as links to your main domain would die off eventually as
well.

This service would be sort of like a love child of Tor and archive.org except
that it would specifically be setup so that your site would always have a URL
to reach the site directly rather than having to do a search. Archive.org
might already have a scheme where links to a site snapshot will never change,
but I'm not sure about that as it's probably not the main focus of the
service.

I think this would be more interesting that attempting to build a commercial
service. A commercial service would probably end up being like a ponzi scheme
where you would need enough new users to cover costs to pay for the old users.
Archive.org and Wikipedia seem to be doing okay though, so perhaps you could
go the same route as a non profit but on more typical hosting infrastructure.

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bhoomit
I totally agree with your point here

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prodigal_erik
After hearing TextDrive change hands and waver on a commitment like this, it
would have to be some kind of well-capitalized trust or foundation obligated
not to default.

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merinid
Can you elaborate on the calculations. I don't quite see it. Let's say you use
a run of the mill host like Dreamhost and pay around 110 dollars a year to
host and renew, you would run out of money in 18 years. And if you truly
wanted your service to be forever, you would want to trwat that 2000 as an
endowment, which again doesn't make sense from a numbers standpoint (you would
be LUCKY if you made 10pct a year).

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ISL
Forever is a very long time. How forever is forever?

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devendramistri
It depends on what is "forever" here. Like in some mobile plans in India, the
lifetime validity ranges from 2 to 5 years. There would be some time limit
(off course in years). So after looking at that number one can decide.

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dawson
Can you share your numbers and how you came up with $2000? (genuinely
interested)

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jayzalowitz
All numbers have inflation you have to account for which you basically have to
do pmt/growth rate (I assume 4% to guard against bullshit) to get a
perpetutities value. To ensure that nothing could really ever touch the site.
$8 a year towards bulk registration, $72 to storing literally everything on an
average site and hosting it with increasing costs as you have to maintain more
and more outdated systems.

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jayzalowitz
To wit, the principal would be kept in a trust, so if the main company ever
failed to host, another could be engaged to take care of it, etc.

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whichdan
I absolutely wouldn't pay for more than ~5 years of service at any given time.
That said, a model like NearlyFreeSpeech.net would make a lot of sense -- pay-
as-you-go out of a fund that you keep putting money into.

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duiker101
I already heard this end it ended really badly for a lot of customers because
then the company changed. I don't remember the full story or the company but
now I would not do it.

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michaelpinto
The problem with "Forever" in tech is that things change so fast that the only
thing you can count on is that companies won't last forever -- even big ones.

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leoedin
You'd need investment returns of at least 1% above inflation to pay for the
cheapest hosting "forever". Is that feasible?

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stewie2
I still have 50 years to live at least. how many companies can last that long?

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dkroy
I believe I would, depending on the restrictions.

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midibite
Forever = how long you stay in business.

