Best way to keep a legacy website?

I guess the standard answer would be a foundation. In some countries, there are minimum capital requirements for foundations but I don't think it's the case for the US. So some thousands of dollars should be enough to keep a website running forever and also hire web developers and accountants every now and then to maintain it.

If it's a set of unchanging static pages, making sure it's part of archive.org might be the best way.

Put it on the Way Back Machine. Print out a few copies and leave it with a trust of some sort.

Forever is a long time. Indefinite is easy though. Find a company that will accept a deposit for future services, and bonus if they can accept third party deposits to fund your account in the future. Include information about adding funds somewhere and hope someone will find it and pay for it after you stop.

It will go offline at some point in the future, but since you don't know when, it's indefinite.

Could be when the money runs out (but costs may go up or down), or when the hosting company goes out of business, or stops providing this service. Or if they decide to do a KYC check and can't contact you.

Interesting thought. I started self hosting a long time ago due to being censored. So my site runs local use a DNS redirection service. So all the files are on my local box, which I could give or leave to someone. But I do not have anyone in my family with any kind of tech skills.

If you keep it clean HTML/CSS, they could just click index files, I suppose.

This is my site mad on Linux/Markdown, with bash scripts.

http://crn.hopto.org

If it's a SaaS, online indefinitely is impossible. Even if it has enough paying users, you have to maintain the service quality to reduce churn. You will eventually need someone to renew the domain and resolve any payment issues. But that means you need someone else to do it then.

Could this be a peer-to-peer problem? What if we have a distributed way of hosting and maintaining domains for legacy websites? It would be an interesting experiment.

If its a frontend/content-only site (no backend logic), there is a way!

Its very different to what others will suggest, but it will cost nothing and is easy to do.

Convert the HTML/CSS/JS bundle into a base64 url

If it fits in that scheme, the base64 url can basically act as a hash for the website.

As the long as that base64 url is saved somewhere, you can run the site by pasting it into the url bar.

Then its just a question of storage

- Internet archive

- Hard-drives

etc

ipfs