I’m trying to do right by my old buddy Christopher Schmitt and his digital footprint. You might remember we made a thank-you site for him where people shared memories. That’s hosted on a provided Netlify account, and the code is on a public GitHub repo. Notably the site doesn’t use a custom domain name, which I think will actually help the long-term uptime of it. Making sure a domain name is paid for and taken care is a possible failure point. With no extra recurring cost or work here, the domain will work, probably, as long as all hosted sites on Netlify work, which I would guess is quite a long time, even if they sold or whatever.
Christopher had his own website as well, as a great domain: christopher.org. It’s a fine example of a personal website featuring a blog and is something of a portfolio of his career. I subscribe to that method of personal site building still. It’s a WordPress site. I take care of it’s hosting and basic updates.
Fortunately, after Christopher’s death, the ownership of christopher.org made it’s way to his brother David’s stewardship, who had it in a Network Solutions account he had safe access to. That’s good, that means Christopher’s site wasn’t going to disappear for a silly reason like nobody knowing how to access the registrar’s account or lapsed billing.
But the domain christopher.org is still a possible failure point. Surely David will take care of it for as long as he’s able. But who will steward it after David? Will they know what it is? Will they care? Will their life circumstances allow them to pay for it in perpetuity?
My guess is that personal websites in this “just keep the archive alive” mode might last a generation after the owner’s death, but probably not two or more.
The next start of this story is that my friend Jesse Friedman reached out to me recently. One of the things he works on is WP Cloud, which is sort of like meta-hosting. If you wanted to be a WordPress host, you could built it on top of WP Cloud and it would handle a lot of the tech behind it. Automattic’s own Pressable runs on it, for instance.
I used Flywheel hosting for a long time. They used to sponsor CSS-Tricks back in the day as well, but I used them long after that. I like their hosting for the most part. But one thing that happened post WP Engine acquisition is that I got a customer rep (or whatever?) who would regularly email me saying my traffic was too high and I was violating agreements and I needed to pay more money, basically.
I was already on what I thought was a pretty expensive plan. And the account hosted a handful of WordPress sites, all in my opinion pretty low traffic. Plus, I had Cloudflare sitting in front of all them, soaking up likely the bulk of the traffic. I just was sick of hearing how I was over traffic limits. I probably technically was, which almost means I think their traffic limits are just too low. (e.g. their $1,150/year plan maxes at 100,000 visits a month)
Jesse offered to host this site and the handful of others over on Pressable. A generous offer which I could use. I really had to think about it though, as I’ve been turned off lately on the Automattic vs WP Engine fighting. I’ve seen behavior I don’t like on both sides, frankly, and it makes me want to stay out of it. But a few factors influenced my decision. One, it’s WP Engine that was directly annoying me and costing me money, while it was Automattic being generous and helpful. I like to look at what’s right in front of me. Two, and much more importantly, it’s not all about me. This comes full circle as christopher.org gets involved again.
I could chuck christopher.org on Pressable and it would have a good long life there surely, but now it’s tied to my own future death and legacy plan. Automattic has 100-year domains ($2,000) and 100-year hosting. ($38,000, includes domain). Jesse mentioned we could get christopher.org onto that as well.
Ari (Christopher’s partner in life and business), David (Christopher’s brother), and I talked it over and agreed it would be a good plan.
100 years! This is longer than any of us can promise good stewardship of Christopher’s digital footprint. It handles the domain itself, a possible failure point, and the hosting, a separate failure point.
As I write, this is all done. This site is on Pressable and I find the hosting quite good. The team there, with a special shout-out to Phillip Clapham, did a good job of migrating the sites and then working with me to shore up all the little stuff that inevitably comes up during a hosting move. It was all done with speed and grace.
I’ll call out a few things in particular that are nice about Pressable:
- They have actual Git-based deployment, which is something I’ve waved my hands wildly about in the past how it should be a standard feature.
- The OnePress login feature is nice, where you one-click over to the site logged in.
- The little tool they have integrated while moving a site’s domain name over to them is very nice, managing those moves across different hosts/registrars smoothly.
- The traffic handling is decently higher
- You get Jetpack Complete included, which can be a high additional cost if you make use of those features (I totally do).
The christopher.org move was handled by the Special Projects team at Automattic, and special shout out there to Christopher Jones who helped manage that. This all happens on WordPress.com, which handles the domain and hosting, and also has Git-based deployment. The fact that these sites are on GitHub too (sans database) is another nice little bonus of extended digital footprint lifespan.
And Christopher, you should know I got your Grunt build process running again. You’re welcome. But I’m not going to fix those Sass warnings. They are just deprecation warnings, it’s fine.