Say you wanted to host a personal page that can outlive you and be seen by the children of your grandchildren. Other than asking your progeny to keep paying the hosting bills, is there another way?
Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
1–10 of 825 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#2Get 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.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#3Write a book and distribute it in high enough numbers. Things that seem too big to ever fall today might not exists in even 10 years, let alone 500, that's valid for every tech companies and even tech paradigms, you'd need people to actively migrate your site every XX years
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#4Write a book and distribute it in high enough numbers. Things that seem too big to ever fall today might not exists in even 10 years, let alone 500, that's valid for every tech companies and even tech paradigms, you'd need people to actively migrate your site every XX years
Paper doesn't have a great record over a 500 year timescale.
The collection of the Metropolitan Museum has an API
and I went fishing a few months ago for images to print onto 8″x8″ squares and it's clear that older objects pick up damage over time. There are all kinds of beautiful objects from ancient Egypt but they are not made of paper. A print from the 15ᵗʰ century looks like
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/367024
It's frequently said that oil paintings hold up well over time such as
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/816514
but paintings like that get a lot of attention in the form of cleaning and retouching.
Many of my favorite images come from paintings that are about 100 years old, such as the Futurists. These are old enough to have scans in the public domain but young enough that they haven't picked up the damage you see in older art that hasn't been heavily retouched.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#5Look at what has lasted 500 years, and use those media. Websites are not among them.
1) stone 2) books if printed on the right kind of paper 3) metal if it's not something subject to rust
Even if it is possible to make a website that lasts 500 years, I expect we haven't figured out how yet. I'm sure it took people a while to figure out how to make long-lasting tombstones; early North American ones were often made out of sandstone or wood, and are illegible or completely gone now. You may be one of the very first people to give thought to how to make a website that will last that long; what are the odds you will get it right on the very first attempt?
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#6It's not 500 years, but you can lock objects in AWS S3 for up to 100 years, depends if you're satisfied AWS will still be a thing in a century.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#7Write a book and distribute it in high enough numbers. Things that seem too big to ever fall today might not exists in even 10 years, let alone 500, that's valid for every tech companies and even tech paradigms, you'd need people to actively migrate your site every XX years
Paper doesn't have a great record over a 500 year timescale. The collection of the Metropolitan Museum has an API https://metmuseum.github.io/ and I went fishing a few months ago for images to print onto 8″x8″ squares and it's clear that older objects pick up damage over time. There are all kinds of beautiful objects from ancient Egypt but they are not made of paper. A print from the 15ᵗʰ century looks like https://w…
Yeah of course, the og medium probably won't last 500 years, but if it's good enough to matter people will put them in safe spaces or reproduce them. Good quality modern books kept in ok storage conditions should last hundreds of years. I have a couple ~100 years old books and they look as new besides slight yellowing.
Prints are different since they're much more exposed and fragile than books
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Paper doesn't have a great record over a 500 year timescale. The collection of the Metropolitan Museum has an API https://metmuseum.github.io/ and I went fishing a few months ago for images to print onto 8″x8″ squares and it's clear that older objects pick up damage over time. There are all kinds of beautiful objects from ancient Egypt but they are not made of paper. A print from the 15ᵗʰ century looks like https://w…
Yeah of course, the og medium probably won't last 500 years, but if it's good enough to matter people will put them in safe spaces or reproduce them. Good quality modern books kept in ok storage conditions should last hundreds of years. I have a couple ~100 years old books and they look as new besides slight yellowing. Prints are different since they're much more exposed and fragile than books
Anything that is on display is going to fade more quickly because of light than something that is kept closed.
When I was a kid in the 1980s I collected many mass market paperbacks (expected to be ephemeral) from as far back in the 1960s, even in the early 2000s I thought these held up pretty well, but circa 2020 I think many of them are getting pretty bad. (Contrast that to trade paperbacks that are sometimes "acid-free" but that frequently break in the first minutes of use because of incorrect and inconsistent construction.)
My house is humid and not a great place to store books, but I went looking in an academic library that follows "good" practices and found that mass market paperbacks from the 1980s and earlier were in bad shape too.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#9Write a book and distribute it in high enough numbers. Things that seem too big to ever fall today might not exists in even 10 years, let alone 500, that's valid for every tech companies and even tech paradigms, you'd need people to actively migrate your site every XX years
Paper doesn't have a great record over a 500 year timescale. The collection of the Metropolitan Museum has an API https://metmuseum.github.io/ and I went fishing a few months ago for images to print onto 8″x8″ squares and it's clear that older objects pick up damage over time. There are all kinds of beautiful objects from ancient Egypt but they are not made of paper. A print from the 15ᵗʰ century looks like https://w…
> A print from the 13ᵗʰ century looks like
It says "ca. 1435–1491" - the 15th C.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to host a website for 500 years?
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Paper doesn't have a great record over a 500 year timescale. The collection of the Metropolitan Museum has an API https://metmuseum.github.io/ and I went fishing a few months ago for images to print onto 8″x8″ squares and it's clear that older objects pick up damage over time. There are all kinds of beautiful objects from ancient Egypt but they are not made of paper. A print from the 15ᵗʰ century looks like https://w…
> A print from the 13ᵗʰ century looks like It says "ca. 1435–1491" - the 15th C.
Corrected