Hosting isn't so much the issue. You need to create something worth keeping around for 500 years. If you succeed, people will make sure it's available somehow.
Something 500 years old is by definition worth keeping, alone for historians.
Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
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Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#42The only way to make something last 500yr is to make it important enough that other people preserve it.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#43Get it printed on a physical monument made of metal/stone, put it on property you own, and engage a lawyer to set up the will and property covenants to require its ongoing existence and maintenance. Our guesses about what the web looks like ten years in advance are likely to be wrong, let alone 500.
Engrave a QR code into stone
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#44Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#45inscribe it on a marble and bury it.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#46500 years is too long for modern tech. You will definitely need many copies of different types of storage, down to atomic-level records such as DNA. GitHub's Arctic Code or Amazon vault looks like the first Godzilla computers, but you're asking for a "500-years PC". Perhaps there will be a technology that allows you to write site files in the DNA directly of your children and run a micro-DNA web server in the body, a…
This DNA writing idea is premised on the concept that most of our DNA is "junk", which is an increasingly unlikely idea. Most of it does not code for proteins, that's true. We are slowly uncovering more and more functions for the rest.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#47Since there are many variations of "then don't use a website!" Answers here, I'll restate the puzzle. Say you had to host the information as a set of static HTML documents and you wanted them to remain accessible for as long as possible; what strategy would give you the best odds?
Etch all the dependent technologies in stone so that somebody could replicate it.
Starting maybe from the transistor, if you're insistent on the full experience of loading the website from a browser with HTTP on TCP/IP networking.
Otherwise you can just etch the HTML in stone with a brief explanation of what the tags mean (eg. part of the HTML spec). Generally popular languages can survive 500+ years, so one can safely presume that some people 500+ years later can understand our English if they put in some effort.
.. I don't know why anyone would presume the web in any form would exist in 500 years. It would be fortunate if humanity as we know it still exists in 500 years. We are so capable of wiping out ourselves with various techs (whether intentionally or otherwise) that the odds are not really that great.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#48Hosting isn't so much the issue. You need to create something worth keeping around for 500 years. If you succeed, people will make sure it's available somehow.
Something 500 years old is by definition worth keeping, alone for historians.
Who are regularly awash in the random detritus and scraps of paper left behind by our priors
While I agree they are interested in everything, I think they are more interested in sampling insignificant works, as opposed to archiving all of them
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#49How do you know what the internet will look like in 500 years? Sites from 20 years ago are broken, you can expect that unless you’re using plain text and html that standards will change in 500 years and people will not be able to access your site. Then there’s issues with domains. You’d have to setup a trust and again assume we will still be using domains in 500 years. If you use something like S3 then you’ll have to…
Even plain text is no guarantee. This assumes that future people will read/understand/use latin characters. ASCII could very well be replaced in the medium-term future