Recently WordPress.com announced a profound new 100-Year Plan for hosting websites. I’ve thought a lot about how to keep websites (mostly personal blogs) alive after the authors of those blogs are no longer here so this is something I was curious about. I’ve written about preserving your writing as recent as July.

Love This

First, I applaud what WordPress is doing here and think that we need more organizations providing technology, infrastructure, and logistical solutions to help content stay online for a very long time, preferably many hundreds if not thousands of years. This offering strikes me as the most significant, and from an organization that I would be comfortable trusting, that has ever been provided.

I hope this urges other tools and organizations to consider ways that they can provide similar capability, or even slightly different since this 100-Year plan doesn’t seem to differentiate between an active site versus an archived site. I would think that if you make a clear decision that a site is now archived and new content isn’t being created you could reduce the hosting costs dramatically.

Cost

Much has been made about the fact that this 100-Year Plan costs $38,000. I think a lot of people are just looking at this number and reacting without parsing it through. Let’s break it down.

This service is provided as part of WordPress VIP hosting solution which is their more advanced service. Your domain name is also baked into this. A domain costs approximately $12/year, or $1,200 for the duration.

That leaves $36,800 for hosting, or $368 a year, or about $30/month of hosting cost. That seems like a reasonable cost for WordPress VIP.

This also all has to be paid up-front, which makes sense since the paying entity is going to “disappear” at some point during the 100 years, and it isn’t predictable when that will be.

Is $38,000 a lot of money? Very much so. But I don’t think this is terribly priced for the components that you are getting, and the need to pay up front makes logistical sense.

Probably Not For Me

So, am I going to use this? Probably not, or at least for now. I don’t host on WordPress and I’d rather not start. The idea of having your content in a database with all of that complexity for 100 years seems like an odd approach. Of course that also depends on the use case. If it is a website that is meant to outlive you, a static site seems like a better solution. If it is a website that you plan to evolve and change for 100 years then maybe.

I’m happy seeing innovation here. Lets hope for continued activity to create even better solutions.