If I died tomorrow, how long would my webapp keep running? | Hacker News Reader

If I died tomorrow, how long would my webapp keep running?

casparwre.de

72 pointsmikiobraun38 comments

This may be out of topic, but it seems that user reviews for https://keepthescore.com/ use "thispersondoesnotexist" profile pics (or similar service).

Even without knowing of these, they seem off. I'm not sure they are a benefit to illustrate actual human reviews, it makes these reviews feel off too, when you're aware of their source.

This might be a very personal thing, but I'd feel better reading reviews with just drawings of faces than this.

Do you have a good reason to believe “Cate” doesn’t in fact have a conjoined twin with a rare facial deformity placing her left eye roughly in line with her mouth?

Maker of Keepthescore here. You are correct. How did you know?

There's six faces and two seeds. It's hard to describe, but if you bring them up in an image viewer and cycle through the directory you'll see it right away.

Also, all of the eyes are in the same exact position in all of the pics.

I guess it's not hard to explain.

Agreed. What is the ultimate purpose of a review and an assosciated pic? To tell me that another user had this to say, which is more trustworthy than anything the seller has to say.

But if any part of that review is fabricated or deceptive, then you have done 2 things, you've successfully duped some people, and proven to other people that nothing on your site should be believed. The reviews can only be considered pure fiction.

If you don't want to show someone's real face for privacy or permission reasons, then don't show anything at all, or use some kind of graphic that makes no attempt to appear like a real person.

Same goes for the names. I have no reason to believe these are anyone's real names, and if they're not the reviewers real name, then why put any name at all?

There is no answer to that question that actually holds water. You can't say "because a name is more appealing because it looks more authentic"

> What is the ultimate purpose of a review and an assosciated pic?

If I had to guess, it’s a subtle manipulation with the idea that we more heavily weigh the statements and opinions of those who resemble us or are appealing to us

sigh ok, the nominal or supposed purpose.

It's a good idea to have a plan if you will fall into long coma, be unconscious and unrecognized in a hospital for months, get falsely imprisoned in a foreign country etc. For backups it's a good idea to not rely on providers that charge your credit card every month, but instead have a wallet, or you can pay for multiple years (yes, there is at least one that allowed me to do that) in advance.

For webapps... Given that in that time there will be probably many vulnerabilities discovered, maybe it's better you just have backups and restore it from them once your credit card declines, given e.g. GDPR - or equivalents - implications. Assuming you don't have employees (if that, see below).

And if you die.. if you don't have dependants, who cares. If you do, that's basic business continuity operation.

I think upon death there are automated systems within financial institutions to close bank accounts and credit cards; AFAIK death records are public.

Therefore, probably at the next billing cycle, as a dead man makes no credit card authorizations.

How about the bank or even the national finance? Although more unlikely then the cloud provider or the DNS registrar (verification needed), the bank or the fiat could also cease to function. I would like to remark that, a single point of failure also applies for financial systems, but often overlooked by people.

>I am the sole developer of a webapp that has around 5,000 USD in monthly revenue.

Please let me take care of it after you die!

Maker of Keepthescore here. Sure!

> Payment failure

Visa now has Visa Account Updater [1], and Mastercard has Mastercard Automatic Billing Updater [2]. It looks like American Express has their own too [3].

If one configures some form of automatic payment on their cards (AutoPay in the US; direct debits or GIRO in other parts of the world), along with using a "wallet" comprising multiple cards or bank accounts like PayPal [4] — it feels like paying for services would go on for longer than expected.

[1] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/visa-accoun...

[2] https://developer.mastercard.com/product/automatic-billing-u...

[3] https://www.godaddy.com/help/about-credit-card-account-updat...

[4] PayPal's more than happy to also take money from your bank accounts without your consent if your cards fail, if you have the accounts added, just to keep your bills paid.

A person I'm vaguely acquainted with runs a web store as a solo venture. She was in a traffic accident and injured badly enough to be unconscious for an extended period of time and unable to do anything with the website, it kept selling product until everything registered out of stock and eventually she was able to shut the site down (no idea how the merchant account didn't get suspended in the 5 months or so as nothing shipped and obviously there was no response to any charge back)

I ran infra to power a vps hosting solution where I was the solo admin for 6 years. A hard drive crash took out a critical database and that spelled the end of my cash cow. I now keep websites on cloud servers and autopay, however most terms of service gives the provider the right to discontinue service after your death. Best to keep a will and a reputable steward to maintain your systems posthumously

You didn't have backups of that critical database? You didn't use at least RAID on the machine that hosted the database?

No need to use cloud if you are careful.

Yes and yes. When is the last time you tested your bare metal restores?

Thus why businesses should not be sole proprietors but at minmum single member LLC's. Which would not "die" with the death of the owner,

This has to already have happened. There's so many WordPress sites, some of them must be zombies, functioning long after the owner has died.

Sure. But this would be a zombie business

1. Service providers need users to confirm some policy changes before a deadline, or the account can be frozen.

2. Service providers automatically detected that the user is violating policies, and need to contact to re-activate the account.

3. Service providers update technique requirements or API, making running app failed.

I was thinking the same thing just now, after getting an email from my dynamic DNS service to update my hostnames.

> What's the best way to preserve the artifacts of your own life and ensure they're disseminated after you're dead, or at least available, especially if you're a solitary person with no foreseeable descendants?

There should be some kind of service where people will keep your digital stuff running (until running out of the funds you gave them access to), like how lawyers manage one's estate.

One of my crowning Engineering achievements was a Zombie Webapp. I owned the entire server side, and spent about 8 months building something robust, but with a small server footprint. As it turns out, our investor hated the app that it powered, so we shut it all down...or so we thought.

18 months later, we started getting disk-space alerts as the DB file system filled up. As it turns out, we'd gotten rid of all of our alerting & monitoring except for the "last resort" fallbacks, which were starting to fire. The system had performed its task flawlessly for the entire time.

I built startupgrid.net in 2011 using PHP to scrape CrunchBase website; it was simply a front-end search and filter for Crunchbase.

It worked perfectly up until 2019 or 2020; Crunchbase didn't change their HTML and the server would run the scrape on user load (no db/caching). I don't know what the billing situation was, maybe Dreamhost, and I had moved on to other projects and left the renewal to auto.

Finally, it died because of some required manual updates to server/PHP version for security or something.

It seems that some people are found to have died previously usually it's the 3-4 year mark.

Not too sure how COVID impacted things[0].

The "benefit" they had is having a direct debit (preauthorized payments).

Interestingly people seem to have taken the "hint" and stopped trying to contact them.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-surrey-64400776

If you're hosting it yourself, until somebody comes in and turns off the equipment.

If it's hosted on the web, until the hosting company cuts off your service for non-payment.

And if the website is small enough that it's hosted for free, until the hosting company stops having a free tier.

There are still websites running on angelfire and other free sites since the 90s

I guess the name Angelfire makes much more sense now.

Yeah I'm hosted off my home Synology NAS, so my site would go down once someone powers that off or two of the hard disks die. My domain I renew for 10 years at a time.

I have some apps on iOS App Store and I got charged 99 bucks per year for listing, assuming there’s no breaking changes both in terms of API and listing policies on iOS in the next couple of years, they probably gonna last until my credit card expires. Hopefully at that time someone interested enough would fork my repos and continue maintaining them.

Apple to Remove Outdated Apps from the App Store https://www.infoq.com/news/2022/05/apple-app-removal-policy/

> Spectacular failures include

Someone misplaced a comma (hello YAML), prod dies, yor site doesn't come up because never it happened to test the infra against the bla kout

Mine is running on a Docker container with a SQLite DB. Unless there's a power outage, it'll run forever

I can not really believe he is making 5000 usd per month with that.

"Acts of God" is what criminals claim, its the usually unprovable malicous criminal act by a company, bank or fraternity.

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