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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

This is possible because the website is made of .html and other multi-media files in directories. There are no moving parts. As long as there's a webserver it's immortal and probably the closest any of those in Heavens Gate will get to the concept.

We really need more websites that are .html and files in directories. Making everything an executable (either server or client side) leads to very short lifetimes.

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If they had built it in PHP they might wish they had died and gone wherever.

In that case they don’t even need the webserver if it’s archived in the Internet Archive.

It’s also blazing fast. Which is so much different from how most websites feel these days. Reminds me of the html classes I had back when I was a kid.

Such sites can exists on things like S3 forever probably. The only things to care about are domain name and certificates.

domain name being arguably the most difficult thing here as it requires some interaction for at least payment. Certificates you can fully automate nowadays with LetsEncrypt and certbot or even managed by AWS no problem

Nah, LE and ACME only hides the enormous complexity of CA TLS certs. And if they'd set it up when LE came out then it'd have stopped working by now because acme protocol doesn't work with LE anymore. Only acme2 protocol works. This is just one example. There's also the 4 times the LE root certs have expired in the last ~7 years. Not even thinking about all the certbot or acme client issues that can happen.

Unmantained HTTPS with CA TLS only has a lifetime of a couple years at best. Sometimes just a few months. Not that it'd be bad to have, but for a long living website you have to do HTTP+HTTPS. Not just fragile CA TLS HTTPS only.

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