Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?

That's a really tricky thought exercise. Legal trusts in most countries have time limits. Businesses come and go all the time. I think you are describing the same dilemma that companies offering freezing/preservation of your body or head upon death/near-death are dealing with. That is probably the business model I would study to find out what countries have the legal structure to support their requirements and thus your requirements. Even then they and their clients are accepting some risk. I suspect you will have to invest some capitol in this if you don't want your future generations to carry on this project on your behalf.

If your time requirements were shorter I would suggest a legal trust and set requirements for trustees to ensure the domain and site are preserved. I would also add instructions in the site itself to have family members preserve the site or even create new domains or methods of presentation. Each generation of family member could then create their own trust and repeat the process through inheritance. Your lineage could essentially leap-frog the system and compensate for businesses going bankrupt or technologies changing assuming they value the site and wish to add to it. I think your future generations would appreciate the ability to update the site. "Keys change, technologies are updated..." -- The Davinci Code

You've missed the boat (literally and figuratively), but GitHub's Arctic Code vault would have been a solid solution: https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/

This isn't a fair premise. Websites have not existed for 500 years and were not possible until roughly around the time of their inception.

Hm. I think your best bet is to make it easy for archive.org to archive.

archive.org will work on making your legacy technology work, as they are doing for flash, for example. Or they will find projects to make that work. That has a higher probability to work, opposed to finding a silver bullet now.

Though, the silver bullet there would be to minimize technological complexity. Make a simple static site with hugo, for example. That's easy to archive entirely.

Probably the only way that has a chance of success is some kind of trust fund that will accumulate funds to keep the website in operation, including converting it several times to whatever's in fashion in 100, 200... 500 years.

Or, as some other post has already said, become so famous that people will record everything you've said. Although the first option only requires becoming moderately rich, which may be easier.