
Ask HN: How do I make sure blog stays up after I die? - erikbye
Assuming it’s not something I want to burden friends or family with.
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davismwfl
Most assured way, place it in a managed trust with enough money to keep it
running or a way for it to generate enough money that it fills the trust with
operational funds to cover costs. While you are alive you control the trust,
upon your death it would be managed by a trustee.

Probably other ways, but this one will work, that is how family assets are
handled many times and also can handle tax complications cleanly etc. There
are multiple legal structures btw that accomplish the same thing. If it is
truly critical this is the tried and true way to make it happen at least to my
knowledge.

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NedIsakoff
How long a time frame are you talking about? 10 years? 20 years? 3 months? 1
year?

If it up to 1 year, find a company that lets you pay up front and pay up
front. Also cover domain registration as well.

It becomes harder the longer you go though, with time frames like 50 years
you'll be looking up trusts and etc.

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mrdependable
Not sure if you're willing to switch platforms, but with
[https://posthaven.com/](https://posthaven.com/) it says in their FAQ that
after 12 months if you stop paying your blog goes into archive mode which
basically means they will host a read-only version forever.

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mooreds
Well, unless you want to task someone with running a server, you're going to
be tied to the fate of a company. You can either go with a free choice (like
netlify) or a paid choice (standard hosting company, AWS s3). Those will be
simpler.

As other commenters have said, it's definitely tied to the length of the time
you want your blog to be available. For 10 years, I'd run a quick script to
crawl the blog
([http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3172](http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3172)
documents how) and push it up to s3 or netlify. For either, I'd set up a
prepaid credit card to pay for the expected traffic times 3. You can also
prepay for your DNS names.

You might need to write up some instructions for a friend to do the final sync
and switch over DNS.

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tmaly
Assuming there will be no content after you pass, you could always arrange for
it to become a physical book.

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fantalamera
Google Cloud (and the other big cloud providers) have their "Always Free" tier
where you can host a static website forever. This does not include you own
donation of choice though, but solves hosting.

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peter_d_sherman
First off, Great Question!

Your question is a very interesting one, because it blends themes of
persistence, visibility, and accessibility within the context of the web...

Before we talk about the web, let's talk about persistence outside of the
web... to gain persistence of your writings outside of the web, you could
collect all of them into a book, and physically publish that book.

That would make your writings somewhat persistent, although, perhaps not as
accessible as they would be if they were on a website.

But alas, the web changes over time.

Web site hosting companies come and go, and freely hosted web page providers
frequently change hands and become subject to owners with new terms,
conditions, and inactivity deletion policies... If I recall correctly,
Geocities or Tripod (both free hosting providers), one or the other went out
of business and lost thousands of free pages that people had created... so
it's not guaranteed that any given free hosting provider will be in business
5, 10, 20 years from now...

A few ideas...

1) Put the same blog on multiple free blog hosting providers. That way if one
goes down, it will still be mirrored by the other providers.

2) Make sure all of those blogs are indexed by the Wayback Machine:
[https://archive.org/web/](https://archive.org/web/) (The Internet Wayback
Machine will probably stick around for awhile...)

3) I suppose you could write a book, and then if the book became a literary
classic, like say, The Bible, then it would it would be copied and printed and
re-printed throughout history. (On the other hand if your book didn't become a
classic, then it wouldn't be reprinted, copies of it would be progressively
harder to find, and at least in physical printed form, as more time went by,
it might not achieve persistence...) But if you did write a book, you could
probably get it on Google Books and on Amazon's electronic shelves (you'd
probably want to make it free), and there it might stick around as long as
Amazon and Google are in business... which might be reasonably decent
persistence...

4) Oh yes, you'd probably want a legal notice in your writings saying that
anyone can copy them at any time and for any reason -- or whatever set of
conditions you'd prefer to apply. But keep in mind, the less conditions you
apply, the more other people will be willing to freely copy and share the
material, resulting in more persistence...

5) You could additionally put your writings in audio/video formats and upload
them to YouTube and other video/audio hosting services.

6) You could host your writings (in whatever media format(s)) on P2P
networks... if enough people downloaded them, they might stick around for
awhile...

