January 16, 2026
Paper vs Pixels: 100-Year Beef
Ask HN: How to make my website exist for 100 years?
Will your website outlive you? Paper vs pricey plans vs crypto
TLDR: A debate on making a site last a century split the crowd between paper backups and pricey options like WordPress’s 100-year plan. Others pushed static pages, human-readable formats, or decentralized storage, while devs dunked on Node—proving digital immortality is part tech, part library science, part publishing.
A simple question—how do you keep a website alive for 100 years?—turned into a full-blown internet family feud. The old-school crowd yelled, “Print it!” arguing that ink on paper beats flaky servers and forgotten passwords. One wag even joked, “Convert your essays into TikTok dance moves,” before doubling down on libraries and hard copies: leave something your kids can actually hold.
Then came the sticker shock: WordPress now sells a 100-year plan—$38,000 for hosting + domain or $2,000 for the domain alone—cue collective gasp. The pragmatic camp fired back with “static site or bust,” insisting simple pages that don’t need databases are easier to preserve. A dev dropped a spicy grenade: “There is no hope anything touching Node or npm will run in a year,” triggering a mini flame war. The archivist vibe showed up too: plain text and markdown, not PDFs, plus regular static exports to dodge format graveyards. One romantic offered a century roadmap: back up a Google Doc, bind it in 20 years, publish in 60, and by 100, “make it a very good book.” Meanwhile, the crypto-curious pitched Arweave/IPFS, promising a “permanent web” and pointing to underground libraries keeping files alive. The mood? Equal parts panic, poetry, and petty tech beef over how to live forever online.
Key Points
- •Printing writings and keeping duplicate paper copies in different locations is recommended for long-term preservation.
- •The article argues physical copies are easier and less expensive to maintain over 100 years than digital hosting.
- •Physical documents may be more meaningful for descendants than discovering content on the internet.
- •Paper is characterized as resilient; share digital writings widely and donate paper copies to libraries.
- •The article acknowledges preservation may fail and notes the originator won’t be present to see the outcome.