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WordPress Now Has a 100-Year Domain Registration Option (siliconrepublic.com) 69

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Hosting platform WordPress has announced a new century-long domain registration plan for users who want to ensure a lifelong digital legacy. From a report: Its new 100-year plan is designed to give users "the ultimate security and longevity for their digital presence" at a cost of $38,000 -- working out at $380 per year of the plan. While average domain registrations range from one year to a maximum of 10 years, WordPress's new plan allows users to secure their domain for 100 years.

The plan comes with other features as well, such as multiple backups of content across geographically distributed data centres, unmetered bandwidth and "personalised" 24/7 support. The company also claims the plan comes with "enhanced ownership protocols" and "top-tier" managed hosting. In a statement, the company said the offering could be used by families who wish to preserve their digital assets such as stories, photos, sounds and videos or by founders who want to protect and document their company's history.
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WordPress Now Has a 100-Year Domain Registration Option More

WordPress Now Has a 100-Year Domain Registration Option

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  • Never a good sign (Score:5, Insightful)

    by topham ( 32406 ) on Monday August 28, 2023 @06:54PM (#63804534) Homepage

    Offerings like this often precede obvious signs of monetary issues.

    You can't predict your companies future enough for a 100 year commitment.

    • I was just thinking what makes them think they'll be around for 100 years let alone 10 more with the way stuff like this comes and goes.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ls671 ( 1122017 )

        $38,000 for wordpress at $380 a year is usury anyway when you can host it for free or almost. Not saying you should use wordpress although but hey!

      • And even if they are, will they look anything like their current offering?
        In the UK for example, Ceefax launched in 1974 as a way to get text-based pages of information on your TV screen, people started switching from it to the internet in the late 1990s, and it was discontinued as a service in 2012.

        Do people really think that the current state of technology is how it is going to be until the end of time, and there will be no new inventions?

    • hopefully the money is in a escrow and earns interest etc wordpress the company should not be running this...

      wordpress still cant get IPv6 running (although they did add IPv6 to their DNS recently...)

      regards

      John Jones

         

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lsllll ( 830002 )
      Usually when they offer things like this, they have backings from insurance companies "in case shit", otherwise nobody would ever trust cryogenics companies.
    • Geocities only lasted 15 years.
    • WordPress's revenues of $1.3B come out to over $640k per employee. I don't think they are hurting for $. Maybe enough crazy people asked that they decided to take their money.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kmoser ( 1469707 )
      They're relying on the fact that jQuery will never die.

  • the rules for domain may change long befor that ti (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Monday August 28, 2023 @06:55PM (#63804538)

    the rules for domain may change long before that time.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lsllll ( 830002 )
      Right! In 25 years DNS and ICANN may completely become obsolete.
    • Good point.

      At that price, most of the "value" of the deal (if there is any true value) is in providing media hosting and a software environment for it to run in. If the offer is fair (an open question) then coping with DNS etc changes in a way that maintains the function of the website's code. Certainly, I'd look for that in the contract if I considered it.

  • Good God, Why? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by darkpixel2k ( 623900 ) on Monday August 28, 2023 @06:55PM (#63804540)
    Why buy a 100-year WordPress domain?
    You think WordPress will be popular in 10 years?
    If you die, do you expect your site to remain "alive" for the next 99 years? Without being completely rooted thanks to all those crappy WordPress plugins you installed?

    • You think WordPress will be popular in 10 years?

      First, you are conflating wordpress.com the hosting business, and WordPress, the open source CMS. (To be fair, Automattic wants you to conflate them, but still.)

      Secondly, who knows? The WordPress CMS has been around for 20.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        First, you are conflating wordpress.com the hosting business, and WordPress, the open source CMS. (To be fair, Automattic wants you to conflate them, but still.)

        Huh...they got me. But then again, I haven't dealt with WordPress for nearly 15 years.
        I recognized just how bad it was and moved on.

        Secondly, who knows? The WordPress CMS has been around for 20.

        ...apparently a lot of people haven't moved on...

      • Re:Good God, Why? (Score:4)

        by taustin ( 171655 ) on Monday August 28, 2023 @11:09PM (#63804932) Homepage Journal

        Secondly, who knows? The WordPress CMS has been around for 20.

        Kongo Gumi has been operating in Japan for over 1,400 years. A restaurant in Austria for over 1,200, a winery in Germany nearly as long, a pub in Ireland over 1,100.

        This is being marketed to individuals, it's being marketed to corporations, and there are many that are already over a hundred years old.

        • None of these are in the tech industry. Restaurants are a timeless business (as an industry, not individual restaurants since they are incredibly hard to run), because people will always want to eat. Same for pubs, hotels, wineries, etc.

          You can say companies will always want to have a marketing presence.. but "online" could change dramatically in 100 years. Heck, the Internet and how websites are built changed dramatically in the last 30 years. Maybe that pace of change will slow down, but... I wouldn't b

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by taustin ( 171655 )

            None of these are in the tech industry.

            But they are the market for 100 year domain registrations. Very, very few customers of tech companies are tech companies. That's the point.

            Restaurants are a timeless business (as an industry, not individual restaurants since they are incredibly hard to run), because people will always want to eat.

            Since I was talking about an individual restaurant, what's your point? The overwhelming majority fail within two years, but corporations can, and do, and have, last much, must longer.

            I wouldn't bet on Wordpress being used in another 100 years myself.

            Neither would I. I'm inclined to believe this isn't a very good investment, even if it is backed by some sort of escrow, but the point remains: This isn't a service aimed at individuals, it'

            • Did you not even read the fucking summary where it says "the company said the offering could be used by families who wish to preserve their digital assets"? Even if this was only aimed at companies like you claim, it's still a stupid idea because no company can predict they will still be around in 1000+ years like your cherry-picked examples, much less that the technology supporting this service will still be useful.

    • Re:Good God, Why? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by test321 ( 8891681 ) on Monday August 28, 2023 @07:33PM (#63804634)

      Why buy a 100-year WordPress domain? You think WordPress will be popular in 10 years?

      They market it as 1) "a gitf for a newborn" and 2) an archival service for your lifelong work. For 1) it is certainly not very clever (wordpress.com will eventually lose attractiveness like facebook did), but 2) makes sense if you are a narcissist in his 60+ and worried about the world forgetting your work / published opinions / essays. It does not matter if the wordpress CMS disappears, they just have to preserve HTML and keep it available. Like archive.org preserving Geocities or the National Library of France preserving Skyblog (once a popular blog platform for teenagers before Facebook took their customer base).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Pascoea ( 968200 )

        lose attractiveness like facebook did

        For the most part, I agree with your points. And don't take this as me licking Zuckerberg's boot, (or gargling his balls, or however you want to put it) but really? This [statista.com] doesn't agree with your worldview, no matter how much you hate Facebook, Meta, Zuckerberg, whatever.

        • They want money before they'll reveal the source for that information, so I don't trust your link.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Pascoea ( 968200 )
            I didn't dig into their primary sources either, but I haven't seen anything to indicate Statista isn't reliable.

        • I did not mean facebook was on the way out , but that it "lost attractivity". An attractive place (the fashionable place where you and all your friends spend their day) is what could justify to purchase the domain. Now Facebook is understood as a place for parents, maybe to find the time table of the restaurant (I don't have data though). My point is that if facebook were to sell usernames, that would not be a cool gift for a newborn, and I forecast the same will happen to wordpress.com.

    • This sounds like a great deal for the next Heaven's Gate cult.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Pascoea ( 968200 )
        Did you hear that they finally found the last member of that cult? They found him underneath the kitchen sink, hiding behind the comet. (I'll show myself the door, thank you.)
    • Is it really so hard to understand why they're offering this? It's basically locking in your domain name and website for as long as the current technology holds out, no matter what happens to you. That will probably be much less than 100 years, but it will be much longer than the current 1 year term they offer.
    • I suspect "you" (Joe Random Cellar-Dweller Nerd) are not the target mark .... sorry, "audience", not "mark", that's pejorative ... The audience is people like junior lawyers faced with a will provision they've got to "execute" (whatever the term in US law is) to "preserve [client's] online presence for [years]". And with the technical sophistication you'd expect from a lawyer, they've been asking WordPress for a solution like this.

      As named "executor" to my parent's will, last night I was pricing up a job l

  • who is going pay the differences when that price becomes and big loss for some one.

  • GTFO ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by thomst ( 1640045 ) on Monday August 28, 2023 @06:58PM (#63804546) Homepage

    $38,000?

    Just how stupid do you have to be to pay $380 for ONE year's domain registration, much less 100x that amount for a century's worth - from a company that might very well be out of business decades before your registration expires?

    In fact, given how idiotic this offer appears, it could easily be mismanaged into the ground by the middle of next week ...

    • > Just how stupid do you have to be to pay $380 for ONE year's domain registration, much less 100x that amount for a century's worth

      How much is forgetting to renew a domain worth? Credit cards have expiration dates and it's a lot to manage. Don't the domain management agencies charge more?

      For many businesses $38K ain't much. I don't know if they need Wordpress but too many big sites do.

      It's like the FBI trying to seal Seth Rich's totally-nothing-to-see-there laptop for 66 years - everybody will be dea

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by lsllll ( 830002 )
        Meh, it's still too much. I was gonna say could've been worth it if they managed all the SSL certificates for you as well, since Apple forced the world to renew certs every year and the manual toll it takes just doubled, but then again I wouldn't trust any 3rd party with my keys.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by taustin ( 171655 )

          I was gonna say could've been worth it if they managed all the SSL certificates for you as well,

          The inclusion of "top tier managed hosting" rather implies they might do just that.

      • Ionos(aka 1and1) has been figuring out my CCs automagically for the past 10+ years. As long as i exist i guess and the root account behind the CC exist and don't actually close out my account I guess my domains will keep renewing in perpetuity with them. That's solves the CC issue.

      • If a business is worried about losing their domain because they forget, how about just set up auto-renew? And if your registrar is worth anything, they'll send you a bill if your credit card has expired.

      • I doubt it is or even legally can be "pay once, forget for 100 years" type subscription. There is no way $380 guarantees that 99 years from now they will renew it even if they never heard from you in the last 98 years, even though ICANN rules require that you update your contact info periodically, but you haven't in the last 90 years, or new domain registration rules come into effect. A guarantee of course would mean they will spend any amount of money necessary on lawyers and fees to fight the government a

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by taustin ( 171655 )

      From TFA:

      "The plan comes with other features as well, such as multiple backups of content across geographically distributed data centres, unmetered bandwidth and “personalised” 24/7 support. The company also claims the plan comes with “enhanced ownership protocols” and “top-tier” managed hosting."

      If that's accurate, and it's actually backed by some kind of escrow, it isn't necessarily all that bad.

    • Don't alot of big orgs pay alot more then that to register / renew their domains?

      Might be wrong / outdated, but I recall reading somewhere that alot of the big guys use markmonitor.com to register / renew domains and they charge alot more then 380 per year for a domain renewal(maybe with some other related services - but not hosting or anything related to that).

    • Well. Who knows. It may look pretty savvy in 10 years when it costs 400 or more per year to register and host a domain.

      I am thinking that the bean counters crunched the numbers and figured that the interest alone from that money would pay for the ongoing costs and inflation.

  • Wordpress is going out of business! 100 years what a load of!

  • What are the odds... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Harvey Manfrenjenson ( 1610637 ) on Monday August 28, 2023 @07:00PM (#63804554)

    ...that the contract you sign today with WordPress will still have any meaning in 50 years? In 100? I'm thinking that the odds are very low indeed. So, the cost of the contract won't "work out to be $380 per year". It'll work out to something much larger.

    At some point, WordPress will stop existing (for whatever reason). I also wonder if the service they are contracting to provide will even exist in 100 years. Will we still have domain registries in 100 years? Will people still be storing their personal data in "the cloud"? If they are, will they be paying for it, or will it simply be a free public utility like the roads we drive on? (Less optimistically, will computers or humans still be around?)

    • My guess is that some new thing that nobody has even thought of yet will make the current system completely obsolete.

    • IANAL but I would guess that any contract that you sign is nullified upon your death. So 100 years really means "your lifetime"

      Sort of like how other marketers sell "lifetime warranties" or "unlimited bandwidth". They don't mean what you think they mean.

  • 1000-Year Domain Registration for $380,000?

  • Sonny Bono is going to register one from the grave and extend copyrights even more.

  • LOL (Score:3)

    by RitchCraft ( 6454710 ) on Monday August 28, 2023 @07:47PM (#63804660)

    I've purchased 5 years at a time but this? No way. $380 a year?? I purchase at $10 to $15 per year now. Why would anyone do this?

  • Now give me a hundred-year SSL certificate.
  • Just to recall, 100 years ago we used carriages and horses for transportation, glass syringes, and a shared telegraph per city . Now, we have orbiting telescopes, self-driving cars, and AI

    • ... apart from the self-driving cars and AI.

      We have them the same way as we have teleportation (gestures to elevator) and antigravity (gestures to Cessna 172).

    • I get the drift but your history is off. 1923 was well into the automotive age. Four years later the Model T would cease production. By 1923 horses had disappeared for personal transportation as they were more expensive than new Model Ts.

  • Verisign is contractually allowed to raise .com prices 7% for each of the last four years of a six year period. That comes out to an average 4.7% per year. At that rate of increase, a .com domain will cost almost $1000 per year in a hundred years. Obviously you need to take into account that people will earn more, so you have to discount the price increases accordingly, but renting online space, be it domains or cloud services, is a racket regardless.

  • Because you don't have a terminal illness or are trying to do legacy planning for someone. The question of how to preserve your IP and make things available for your heirs after you're gone in this day and age is a perplexing issue.

    Archivists are worried sick about how to preserve digital files. An old picture can be displayed as it. An old digital file needs software, codecs, physical hardware, etc. Now if you're trying to preserve a decades long blog, throw in yearly domain registration and DNS / web

  • There's every possibility that Wordpress won't be around on 100 years. Does this plan have contingency plans for that? Do they take your money into escrow and invest it so that they can service your account in 100 years? Probably not.

    They take your money NOW, when it is worth the most, due to inflation, and then promise service.

    What about if we come up with some other system besides domain name registration? Similarly SOL.

    If it does become popular, what are the chances that later on in the contract all t

  • Someone figured out it's about $30 a month. I pay a good bit less than that per month for both domain registration and hosting.

  • With the speed of technology advance the internet in 10 years will be something very different than what it is now. Additionally, in 100 years most present day companies won't exist (unless it is Kongo Gumi[*]). So you basically overpaying for something you not going use. [*] Kongo Gumi is a Japanese company that was founded in 578AD and went bankrupt and lost independence in 2006, though it is still operating as a subsidiary of Takamatsu.

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