Ask HN: Our personal domain name will expire when we die, how should we do?

4 points by theowenyoung 3 years ago | 7 comments

If our domain name is no longer valid, then all the links included on Google will also be invalid? Shouldn't we use github.io from a long-term perspective, so that the probability of not expiring in the long run is a bit higher?

LinuxBender 3 years ago |

I am not a lawyer or financial advisor but if money is not an issue then one could get a living trust and have trust managers renew your domain.

Some DNS registrars will let you pre-pay for 10 to 100 years. 10 years is the actual registry limit but some DNS registrars assuming they stick around will hold the 100 year credit on your account and continue renewing your domain on your behalf. This combined with a living trust could get you to 135 years. To go beyond that I think you would need to find a registrar that will honor your living trust and hand your domains over to a beneficiary. Get that in writing.

You may also be able to add a trusted beneficiary as a technical/administrative contact on your domains before you pass. It will be up to them to renew the domain. They could repeat the process adding their beneficiary to the domain.

This of course does not take into account things like your hosted services. Some VPS providers will also let you pre-pay into the account to keep it active. Each VPS provider appear to have a different upper limit on how much credit they will hold. Someone will need to maintain your services as protocols, methods, api's, etc... will evolve or devolve with time and may be deprecated. If your service is hosted somewhere they might handle this assuming your code works with the newer protocols.

theowenyoung 3 years ago | |

I don't think my personal website is worth such a huge cost to maintain after my death, I just don't think it's a good thing to let the links on my personal website become invalid after my death.

LinuxBender 3 years ago | | |

A less expensive option then may be to start 301 redirecting your page to your original git repo idea and hope they stick around and they continue to allow free hosting. It might be worth reaching out to them and discussing your plans and get feedback from them. They might have long term plans to cease free hosting and may or may not share this plan. Consider appointing someone to maintain this setup in the event that the repo provider makes significant changes and expects the end-user to adapt.

mikewarot 3 years ago |

Your best bet at this time is to make sure your pages can all be reached via the Internet Archive.

The Late, Great, Michael O'Connor Clarke had a blog[1], and helped me out with a project once[2]. It was only recently that I learned of his passing, such are relationships on the internet. The Internet Archive is the only way you can see either of those, at present.

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20120610075654/http://www.michae...

[2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20090107033331/http://killsave.o...

cyberpeach 3 years ago |

The thing that keeps me up at night is what’ll happen to the email for my custom domain. If the domain registration lapses, anyone can snag it and do a catch all for my email addresses. Then, they’d just need to do a password reset to get into my accounts (assuming there’s no non-email based 2FA).