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
Just pay some donation, redirect your DNS to the way back machine and bingo.
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
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
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:
Only skip-a-heartbeat moment was when aws sent me an email saying that you I have “one or more S3 buckets that allow read or write access from any user on the Internet”
But none of my containers had write access. All of them had public read, but yeah, it’s a website and they know this: their own route53 DNS points to the containers.
They just sent the same generic mass email to everyone with any public container.
If so, their warning could have been phrased better, but isn’t incorrect.
I got absolutely tarred and feathered at an agency for suggesting this strategy and I just want to say thank you for validating what I wanted to do.
It was more of an issue that they had a bunch of clients on an old CMS system, and they did not want to make any changes the way that the sites were built or hosted.
I can make arguments for and against either side of this idea, it all depends how you want to run your business.
They were unwilling to spend time "training" the team to learn react (in 2020).
They were unwilling to let their senior FE dev spend any time with me to correct the CSS issues I was struggling with.
They used this deception and dishonesty to say "it didn't work" and wasn't worth any more time. I build a prototype in a week. It's not like I spent month(s) on it without any ROI. They just wouldn't look at it because that would mean acknowledging I and or / my ideas had value.
The closest thing I got to an answer is that the CMS they preferred, which was chosen 10 years ago by people no longer working there... was the only way they could support client sites. Because that's what they've been using. Turnover means it's so hard for us to support anything new because we have no time...
Basically they Brawndo'd me.
It was hard to stomach getting fired by the incompetent people driving the business into the ground when I was literally pleading with them to implement money saving measures.
The horse sometimes would rather kill itself than drink the clean water you've found... that's just life. It's hard to accept.
All the good articles and design samples stay online, and maybe the original authors can get a little credit or name recognition from any search traffic that finds it.
The one "liability" to doing this would be for visitors to not realize the site isn't being updated anymore. If vice is still publishing content outside their website they'd have to make it clear that the site is archived and new content is elsewhere, or people might get the wrong idea and assume nothing new is coming.