When people die their web sites usually go down after a year or two, when nobody pays the hosting and/or domain fees, or due to uncorrected technical problems.

This is a problem a company could solve.

For example, my friend Sasha Chislenko died 16 years ago. One bit of luck (in an ultimately unlucky life) was that a group of his friends got together and decided to preserve his web page for eternity – or at least until those friends die off or forget about it.

On the other hand Chuck Moore, the inventor of the Forth programming language, had a personal website at http://colorforth.com that hosted lots of interesting historical and technical material. I don’t know if Chuck is alive or dead (I hope he’s OK!), but his website went down sometime in the last 6 months.

For the subset of humanity that maintain personal websites and blogs, those sites represent an intellectual legacy – I think most of them would like to think that while they may die, their ideas and intellectual contributions will live on, to some degree, on their web site.

Certainly I would.

Of course, the Wayback Machine already attempts to preserve the past web, (and that’s great and worthwhile), but it’s not as good as keeping the original site going. The Wayback Machine doesn’t serve links to the old site, doesn’t preserve the final version (just the last randomly sampled version before the site goes down), and doesn’t serve certain file types, large files, or execute server-side code as the original site did.

Nor is the Wayback Machine well indexed by search engines (for now anyway).

So – a service that does this for a fee would seem to be a viable business.

Like a cemetery or university, in-perpetuity maintenance could be funded by a conservatively managed endowment (a lump sum invested, with the interest/earnings used to pay fees) plus some insurance.

Given that web site maintenance is pretty cheap, this would be quite affordable, I think. Even cheaper if it can be funded by (essentially) a whole-life insurance policy (for younger people).

The main effort would be setting up a suitable legal structure – a technically-minded lawyer could probably do it. I think you’d want some kind of trust and trustees, who manage a central endowment fund (pooled for all customers) and hire technicians to do the work.

Yes, you have my permission to use this idea. My usual terms apply.