Is the Internet Archive at least saving some of it for now?
Do you not keep anything interesting enough on your site for it to matter anyway?
I love when I stumble upon personal websites from the old days (or not so old days), and I feel melancholy about them winking out of existence.
Of course, many sites would have domain names expiring within a year or two, although some people probably buy domains for longer billing cycles.
When I played an MMOG, we had a very complex economic meta game, where you could purchase shops and stalls, and you could trade, buy, sell, and manufacture goods, you could store them, and you could ship them around the world.
And players began to discover that they didn't necessarily need to micromanage, or even manage, their shops. They could set wages and prices in the spreadsheet, then toss millions of coin into the coffers, and then just let it run on auto-pilot.
And then there were players who did this, and retired from the game, or they were even banned. Their properties weren't disabled in any way, IIRC, so as long as those shops had funds to pay the rent, they could attract traders and employees, and operate with impunity, and we began to call them "zombie shops".
These zombie shops began to dominate the economy; even though the trade pricing was not optimal and they weren't being tweaked every day, they could easily absorb a lot of commerce, because there were a lot of them in the marketplace. So it was so frustrating to be an active business owner and competing against zombies!
Of course, a real-life zombie eCommerce site would be more difficult to pull off, but perhaps not impossible, given the logistics of drop-shipping and automated payment processing. Consider a personal website, whose accounts have been prepaid well in advance, with future-proofed technology; it could be the next Energizer Bunny.
Here's a Scavenger Hunt: what's the oldest extant personal website still running today? What's the oldest revision date on a website's page files? What's the oldest personal website where all functionality still remains?
Thinking of the oldest personal websites brings to mind the early web journalers around 1998 or so. I hadn't seen much of life and the world, so it was amazing to read about other people's lives. And there was controversy about whether they would get stalked. I believe everyone eventually got jobs and spouses and moved on because there wasn't a way to turn a little prominence into money. At the time, some of them talked like they were going to be famous pioneers. I suppose the entire early web is forgotten, beyond knowing that ebay and amazon and google date back to those days.
The nearest deadline would be the expiry of my credit card. Shortly after, the website would go down, then the CloudFlare cache would expire.
One way around that would be to pump a lot of money into my DigitalOcean account, and if possible do the same with my domain registrar.
The whole website is on The Internet Archive, and in the case of the website I live from, it's designed to be fully functional while archived.
My personal website is on GitHub, so the markdown files would still be accessible and rendered properly by GitHub.
However, the domain would expire, so you'd have to look at its raw html. I purposely write my content in Markdown for that reason. Some Internet archeologist might find it when I'm long gone, and in theory that part would still be legible.
> Is the Internet Archive at least saving some of it for now?
Probably.
> Do you not keep anything interesting enough on your site for it to matter anyway?
No
I told him to publish ebooks, but he wanted everything self hosted.
Some of the site will show up in Archive.org.