WordPress introduces 100 year domain registrations
wordpress.com
wordpress.com
100 years is long enough that the consequences of failure are nil. Nobody who is pushing this program will be alive to deal with any fallout.
It reminds me of the subtle attitude of people making poor engineering decisions because they’ll be long gone by the time payment comes due.
Lol, excuse me?
I know WP is big but take a moment to reflect on that statement, WP is far from that.
I bought an Emby Premier subscription 8 years ago for $120. You can also pay yearly at $55 dollars. So even if it's not _actually_ a "lifetime" it's been well worth it and pays for itself in a little over two years.
Sure, the offer might as well be for 90 years, or even 50 years without much practical difference, but if it was a bit more honest and said "50 years", would you still call it a money grab?
The fact remains that this will be honored for as long as there are people interested in honoring it. This surely has some value, right?
I think it should be illegal for companies to make any sort of guarantee like this longer than some specified timespan, backed up by some level of "corporate actuarial analysis" around how likely the company is to exist at the end of the term. Bankruptcies happen all the time and they essentially wipe out the claims of customers.
1: https://web.archive.org/web/20180914182353/https://www.inter...
Dear valued customers,
Due to unprecedented and frankly unforeseen inflation no really we couldn’t see that coming, we have decided that a small number of customers couldn’t be costing everyone else something, risking our whole company to go bankrupt, so we’ve decided to migrate every Squatting Domain to our new service at squatting.wordpress.com/[your account name]. Proud to offer the best customer service for a century!
Because WordPress.com is the .blog registry, I guess they could pull it off for .blog domains. Other tld registries have bitten dust already, and other registries have jacked up prices in the previous years. But even at a 10% increase a year (likely the case for .com), the domain renewals will cost about $5K for 100 years. With hosting, support, and WordPress being able to run for 100 years, I think that price is justified.
If ICANN screws WordPress, or whatever WordPress.com uses for hosting screws them, they will be in a mess.
Wordpress does the job. It's not particularly good at anything, but it works damn well. Wordpress is 40% of all sites in the world.
I'm ready for brain uploads and immortality and unlocking the rest of the galaxy for exploration. I'm tired of everyone turning to dust.
(and rivets. Joints. Pipes. Flanges, if we're unlucky)
All of that over ~1 decade. Can you even imagine where we'll be in 50 years?
You're there today.
If we're not careful, buying slightly faster smartphones.
Also, between 2010 and 2020, cancer death rates declined from 173 to 144 per 100,000 population, i.e. a 17% decrease in the US [1].
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/dcpc/research/update-on-cancer-de...
That's something like a billion and a half people who absolutely think the world is different between 2013 and 2023.
Putting these people in an urban job where they then earn $3 a day is then considered progress, regardless of impact on quality of life. For instance the biggest contemporary driver in decline of poverty has been the rise of China. It saw people go from raising large families in rural areas to living in densely packed cities, making iPhones for $3 a day in factories surrounded by suicide nets.
I'm obviously not saying economic development is bad, but that measuring it by metrics is stupid, especially the way the World Bank does which is simply looking at a fixed level of $ consumption/production. What should matter is quality of life. That's obviously what you're referencing, but the metrics are not.
Similarly it doesn’t seem too unlikely that people would be publishing on a platform called Wordpress in 2123.
If there’s anything left of the original PHP code, it will probably have been transformed and rewritten many times over by AI because we already have the capability for that, just missing some context window to process a Wordpress-sized code base.
The NYT is a media property and a trademark, they can choose to deliver their content on any platform they want.
Wordpress is one of such platforms to deliver content (like the hot metal typesetting machine). Other sites could still be around and ditch Wordpress for any other new platform that comes up. And GP would be horrified to think that 100 years from now, people would still use said platform to deliver their content.
Their platform is whatever they call “Wordpress”. In the same way, NYT on a phone app is conceptually the same NYT as the one printed in 1923, even if almost nothing in the production pipeline is the same.
Wordpress is the technology, if it changes, it becomes something else.
That's the difference, explained.
They own the Wordpress trademark just like NYT owns theirs. Somebody who buys a 100-year registration from Wordpress will have the service delivered on whatever Wordpress has become by 2123.
People use WP because it's a technology they understand and can put to a particular use. If that changes, said people may not use it anymore.
If the NYT decides to change their content delivery platform to, literally, whatever, people would still go read the NYT. Their audience doesn't care.
If WP becomes a different product (a static site generator for Rust, deployed with Kubernetes?), their customer base will drop to ~0 overnight.
There are lots of examples of software platforms transitioning to a new foundation while retaining a compatibility shim for those bits of the old applications that customers still need. Text-mode COBOL applications are deployed on Windows 11, which itself has almost nothing in common with Windows 1.0.
Wordpress.com would need to maintain compatibility with some PHP+MySQL plugins. This doesn’t seem insurmountable, especially as AI code translation is now a thing.
You're imagining this change happening in a world where people still care about Wordpress.
Try imagining instead, a world where Wordpress is already a dead technology that nobody would use for a greenfield project, and it's only "legacy" sites that haven't been modified in 10 years (but which are owned by brick-and-mortar companies that continue faithfully paying the hosting bills every month) that are still hosted on Wordpress.com.
Can you not then see the value in some company buying up Wordpress.com, and migrating its customers over to a Wordpress-compatibility-shim over their own service that's based on a not-dead technology?
Just because Wordpress 6.3 is a php monstrosity with a security-disaster-riddled ecosystem doesn't mean Wordpress 12 has to use php and can't have sandboxed extensions. For all we know, Wordpress 12 could be a fancy frontend for a static site generator (marketed as "ultra-caching" or whatever)
Unless some company manages to trademark the term and spends money keeping it alive.
* we maintain multiple backups of your content across geographically distributed data center
* 24/7 Premier Support
* The very best managed WordPress experience with unmetered bandwidth, best-in-class speed, and unstoppable security bundled in one convenient package.
I would not trust anything that's long term more than 10 years, and even that is a stretch. I agree with GP, it's a cash grab.
When the war between Ukraine and Russia first started, energy prices in Europe skyrocketed, causing several utility companies to cancel their customers’ existing fixed-rate plans, to instead pass on all expenses.
As far as I'm aware American Airlines only revoked two lifetime AAirpasses of the 60+ sold; both were accused of using their companion pass fraudulently. From what I remember one was accused of approaching people at the airport and attempting to sell his companion seat, the other was accused of using his companion pass to book a seat next to his for a nonexistent person so he wouldn't have to sit next to anyone.
Say a buyer of this service dies in 50 years. Would their children and potential grandchildren want to take Wordpress to court over the $15,000 valued in 2023 dollars? I would assume not.
This is a terrible deal for a lot of people. Perhaps the better investment would be putting the $35,000 into buying land somewhere random and hope it appreciates in value for one's descendants.
It would be difficult to know if Wordpress (or future acquiring company) is keeping their end of the deal after one's death.
In that time we went from self (and often university) hosted HTML to self-publishing. And it wasn't just Wordpress. A plethora of single-writer and group publishing flourished in an incredibly brief period of time powered in large part by the sudden availability of low priced (and free) hosting and scriptable languages.
In comparison, the past 1/10th of a century has seen little. Choice of JS framework does not revolutionary change make. If anything, there's a now established no turning back movement from federalists, indeed a niche, a result of the swallowing creative and belching out stale innovation FAANGs+ have brought destructive force with. FB does nothing whatsoever now in social good that it didn't do a decade ago. Nor Google. Just as banks do good in facilitating individual with saving, loan and payment solutions, they get fucked up sometimes and in their chasing the last decimal point fuck up people's lives via markets; FAANGs are at the chasing the last decimal point in advertising but fucking up people's lives directly through their brains, and it's got a way to run.
Which roundabout wandering brings me to ask: Will the $100 be put in trust, or similar, to ride out the next revolutionary change in tech that may result in Wordpress no longer be around but some cash needs to be left over for hosting something. The past decade has been all but revolutionary and is no place to base an assumption on the volatility-in-tech two decades down the line.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37271764 (74 points | 1 day ago | 111 comments)
Oil was all the rage and had only started being massively available two decades ago.
Ford had recently started.
And IBM, then CTR, was just 12 years old.
I wonder how things will look in another 100 years. Perhaps the web won’t have changed much. Perhaps the mere concept of a CMS or human-written software will be laughable.
Unrelated, but funny enough to be worth mentioning, it appears IBM’s founder was the father of Fairchild Semi’s.
And yeah things were very different back then, and will be in future too. I don't personally think we're ever going to be in a situation where no human written software will exist though. Human creativity and the ability to do things better don't seem to have too much in common (people still paint despite photography existing, plays are still performed despite film and television and people still work on games and software for systems released in the 80s and 90s simply because they can). But it may be niche at least.
Tomorrow morning (like any other company of course) Wordpress could go bankrupt and they promise to guarantee the status quo for the next 100 years ...
As someone who has just spent a week trying to integrate the Wordpress API into an external software, I really hoped that they would make an announcement that they have decided to fix all this incredible mess of many years old APIs, incredibly survived all the technological improvements and make a professional and exhaustive developer documentation ...
With inflation, that may almost end up being a fair deal. ($380 in 2023 was about $24 in 1923.)
Cloudflare will not be the same in 10 years. I doubt it will exist as the cloudflare we know today.
Well, I can't predict the future, but I think CF is one of the good ones. I bet on them more than most. They have been pretty consistent with being benevolent for the internet. But you seem to feel differently. Have they rubbed you the wrong way somehow? Why would they allow the US military to buy them out?
I’d expect to be able to host a bunch of century Wordpress sites for very very cheaply, provided you locked down plugin installation (I don’t see how third party plugins could possibly work on sites expected to be that long-lived). Without plugins they’re a known security and upgrade profile, and I expect traffic on 99.95% of them to be effectively nil or highly cacheable.
Support is a bit harder to quantify, but I still would expect that most sites will just quietly chug along and support events will be rare (and again, you’re supporting a very well-known software profile).
To that end the price feels a bit outlandish to me.
Any “forever” or “unlimited” are forms of a Ponzi scheme.
Note: I not saying Wordpress is being malicious. I’m just saying that for the economics of a “forever” or “unlimited” to work, you need to find new money to offset the old costs - and a lot of really good companies have had to learn this lesson the hard way.
Companies also sell products and services below cost to build their brand and/or upsell the customers later.
I don't know WP's cost breakdown, but registering and hosting domains is relatively inexpensive and will likely get (relatively) cheaper in later decades. Meanwhile, they have a customer locked in for 100 years who will have a sunk cost incentive to purchase new features through WP rather than setting up a new domain somewhere else.
(Put loosely, what if they blow it all on executive bonuses the first few years of ramp-up, run out of suckers, and then have no funds to actually provide the service for the next 97 years. I'm not an accountant, but I'd guess not a lot of businesses would want to have 97 years of obligations without recurring revenue, and actually intending and able to honor those obligations.)
What about treat it more like a life insurance policy: you pay monthly/yearly premiums as long as you're alive, and the "lifetime" only kicks in when you die? And the dotcom company covers the "lifetime" part with its own ample insurance, from some company that's been around since the figurative stone age, and won't likely fail until the next stone age?
That spreads out recurring revenue for the company into something plausibly sustainable longer, increases the pool of sales prospects who could afford to buy into this (sales is a different matter), and increases the chance that this service will actually be provided in the end.
(Assuming that they want this to work, and it's not a PR tactic to promote a visionary CEO image.)
IMO never tie your domain registration to your hosting or any other service you run through that domain. You'll regret it as soon as you need to move something.
Network Solutions 100-year domain registration[1][1a] and Evernote's 100-Year Plan[2][2a].
1. https://www.networkworld.com/article/2332012/network-solutio...
2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikeotoole/2014/11/13/evernote-...
I would assume that any company offering this sort of approach would have a trust set up to ensure it can keep its promise. (Ex: invest in S&P and draw off 3% each year to cover maintenance and upkeep)
That’s how I would do it, at least.
The fact that Wordpress doesn’t detail anything like this has me doubting though.
A 100-year plan is for WordPress.com's benefit, not yours. They get a predictable accounting revenue stream for 100 years if they continue to exist; if not, no problem for them, they still got the money, while you get nothing (or whatever a bankruptcy court says). You get... hosting for 100 years. Maybe. What are the odds, and are you factoring that into the price you pay?
It reminds me of file locker sites' "lifetime subscriptions", which amount to however long they continue to operate before the owners lose interest in the hassle or get sued and have to shut down.
Isn't this a one-time payment up front?
Selling even a few of these at $38k each would massively increase profits, and give them a good story to tell investors.
Obviously cannot envision what would replace it by then but our interfaces will be completely different, not just full effortless voice interaction with AI but probably gestures and anticipation analysis.
Imagine the computing power in a penny sized node and the battery would be your body or radio frequency airwaves or solar or kinetics, everything it can absorb.
Look at all the people talking about this.
And this is an excellent way for WordPress to talk about stability and disaster recovery... in ways that aren't nearly as boring as we've done in the past. It's just adding a human spin to why dev ops and infrastructure and security matters. =P
"100 years" is a much better way of saying "5-9s!" Ha.
Edit: I suppose the parent meant WordPress.com, the commercial organization that's making this offer, not the open source software itself.
It’s about using the latest cutting edge technology to build the best possible web application for uses.
“Best” as in; Perfect SEO, Simple theming, Fastest loading possible, Secure, Simple and affordable hosting, and so on.
WordPress is very dated, and they are very comfortable in their niche. The reason they maintain the market share that they do is because there just isn’t a better option for users currently.
But to address your static comment; It in my opinion that most most blog sites store static text that never changes in a database, and a backend server has to query for data and return it to the frontend.
This workflow seems a bit overly complex when I could just store the text in a document, and eliminate the need for a backend server or database.
The internet as we know it was created so that CERN could share static text documents with others. Why don’t we bring the web back to that?
You know that WordPress is actually fast, right? A vanilla install on a crappy $2 a month server will return a response in a few ms.
The problem with WordPress are the plugins and the lack of vetting/rules/oversight. And when they do apply their rules, they apply them in ridiculous ways -- for example, I submitted a plugin that was a wrapper around an open source project, with the project's permission, and was denied because I wasn't the author of the project and the author of the project had no desire to interact with shenanigans like that.
These plugins can do virtually anything and do really "bad" (as in performance and security) things.
If you are doing everything in-house and at least reading/contributing to the plugin code before accepting an external plugin, you can host very performant websites.
I'd even venture to suspect that all these plugins is an indication that people want more functionality than can ever be achieved in a competitor ... but to be clear, there are some pretty solid competitors. These competitors are entirely closed-source, so, choose your poison I guess.
> Why don’t we bring the web back to that?
I know people who host an entire school (very niche skill) online. Their entire thing is built on WordPress. I know of quite a few sites actually running their entire user-facing stack on WordPress (usually with a backend API running Go/C# or something). I even know of some very popular money-management apps where the entire app is just running in WordPress.
The internet isn't just static pages, that ship sailed 3+ decades ago.
The MVP also is cheaper to host compared to the hosting solution you suggested.
https://www.elegantframework.com/blog/2023-04-05-elegant-fra...
Reach out to me via email, I used to work at Automattic/WordPress.com and I'd love to hear more about what you're working on.
Do you know of an option that is more likely to succeed, for the money?
Unless they made some special deal with ICANN, what Wordpress is almost certainly doing is the same thing Network Solutions does (or did? [1]) for their 100 year registration product. Register it for 10 years, and then add more years every so often over the next 100 years to keep pushing the expiration date out (but never farther out than 10 years) until the expiration date reaches 100 years from the start.
[1] I'm not sure Network Solutions still offers 100 years. I just checked and it only offered up to 10 years for the domain itself. It offered up to 100 years on some of their add-ons such as their private registration option.
This is a serious milestone, ending their sustained 10% growth streak that they have been riding for years. Inside the company, this must have raised red alarms and made them start looking for new plans.
https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_ma...
But that got me thinking. Will the web itself be around a century from now? ICANN? HTML? HTTP? A hundred years ago there were no transatlantic flights. The television hadn’t been invented yet. What will the next hundred years bring? Kind of thought provoking really. Good weekend musings.
(2) How much disk space does one get of the $38K? One would think the pricing would be based upon diskspace used
Anyway, If you get this, don't be surprised if it only lasts a decade or two.
> This reminds me of a café in Lausanne that started operations by selling lifetime, three-coffees-per-month subscriptions, and then after a year or so "management changed" and they annulled all subscriptions :D
I mean yeah… it would cost you like 10-15k if you did it any other way but 38k… please.
Like a swan song that lasts way too long through sheer financial will.
If you'd replace the inscriptions on pyrymids and obelisks as well as the various old documents with their digital equivalent we'd have lost them long ago. And they will still be there long after their current digital equivalents have turned to dust. The only defense that digital has is boundless copies, in the hope that some of them survive. But the chances of any particular copy surviving very long is nil and even if it does it is probably going to be unreadable so you need to keep copying.
I’d bet that the Internet Archive will last longer than Wordpress as an organization.
I seriously doubt even if IA lost a bunch of lawsuits would your archived website be in any danger, as there are many many interested parties (including nation states) who are keen to keep the archived websites from disappearing as they are an important public resource.
Without any indication, the whole question whether someone is interested becomes a little meaningless.
That works out to $380 per year for hosting and domain registration.
Source: [1]
1 - https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-100-year-domai...