For a reasonable fee, we'll archive your site, and give you back a copy of the assets you can turnkey host on the original domain for cheap with a static hosting solution (s3, cloudflare, etc).
Everybody wins
I'm really curious what the cost per byte would be to make it worthwhile to offer a "host this byte forever, for one up-front fee" service.
https://help.archive.org/help/archive-org-information/
> *What are your fees?*
> At this time we have no fees for uploading and preserving materials. We estimate that permanent storage costs us approximately $2.00US per gigabyte. While there are no fees we always appreciate donations to offset these costs.
There's some discussion about this idea on this thread, including comments by ?id=markjgraham, who manages the Wayback Machine, thoughts from John Carmack:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29639222
https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1473327982605385735
The same thing happens with brands - someone bought the Montgomery Ward brand at a bankruptcy auction or something - and with store inventory: once the store goes bankrupt, they just sell the entire store contents, right down to the fixtures, to a liquidator who brings in the "Going out of business! Everything must go!" signs.
We’re migrating away but they’ll squeeze out what they can from those that don’t/can’t/won’t.
But they still have to provide continuous support, some amount of updates to keep customers functioning, and maybe even get some new customers as a “value” option (that’s barely functional).
Happens to forums all the time (fuck you Internet Brands and Vertical Scope).
100000x easier to do all this with static web content.
That's too attractive to malware peddlers. It's not particularly widespread currently, mainly because most of the content has been centralized into the same big silos... But what you're envisioning here is just going to get abused by abusers
However, the footer of that website says 2014 and the about page is broken, so not sure if it's still supported.
Also, Cloudflare has a partnership with Web Archive and they offer something similar, but I think it's only made for temporary outages and only archives the most popular pages on your site
Just pay some donation, redirect your DNS to the way back machine and bingo.
Archive Team is a loosely organised group of individual volunteers that share a common interest in Internet preservation, and develop tools and share notes to serve that goal. They're basically one of your old-school Mediawiki communities, with very little budget:
Internet Archive is a full-blown multimillion dollar `501(c)(3)` nonprofit, which functions as more of a general-purpose library. They maintain physical offices and datacentres in multiple countries, host many petabytes of data, do activism, run conferences, and when they develop custom tools it tends to be somewhat more advanced than the Archive Team's decentralized web scrapers, like custom book scanning hardware:
https://archive.org/details/eliza-digitizing-book_202107
A lot of the information in the Wayback Machine, which is run by the Internet Archive, was saved and contributed by Archive Team. For example, as of writing this comment, that is true of the latest snapshot of `https://www.vice.com/en`. You can see this with the "About this capture" button on a Wayback Machine capture.
Both groups have ways to receive monetary donations.
For Archive Team though, I wonder if it would be more useful to donate compute by running their Warrior archiving VM/container, or contributing code to their GitHub: