Wordpress selling 100-year domain and hosting plan for $38,000
- Reference: 1693229115
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/08/28/wordpress_100_year_plan/
- Source link:
"A domain is your most valuable digital asset," opens WordPress's [1]pitch for your next century of web publishing. To protect that asset, your $38k will assure Wordpress will maintain "multiple backups of your content across geographically distributed datacenters, automatically submit your site to the Internet Archive if it's public, and will provide an optional locked mode."
Users will also [2]receive enhanced ownership protocols to help with transferring the site's ownership, top-tier managed hosting that comes with unmetered bandwidth, and 24/7 premier support.
[3]
For 100 years.
[4]
[5]
Security is promised to be "unstoppable," which presumably excludes the third-party [6]plug-ins that so often include complications such as [7]backdoors and make running Wordpress such an – ahem – unique experience.
[8]Website maker Wix embarks on weird WordPress-trashing campaign, sends 'influencer' users headphones from 'WP'
[9]WordPress-powered sites backdoored after FishPig suffers supply chain attack
[10]GoDaddy joins the dots and realizes it's been under attack for three years
[11]WordPress plugin hole puts '2 million websites' at risk
Wordpress reckons those interested in this plan will come from families who want to preserve digital assets for future generations, founders who thinks their companies will endure for a century, and individuals who just want a persistent online home. It is also thinks its content management system can play the long game with as its software "powers nearly half the web and remains the most trusted CMS on the planet."
As a reminder, the average human life span was 73.4 years in pre-COVID 2019, according to the [12]World Health Organization .
The yearly $380 places the plan's [13]cost in between Wordpress's premium offer ($132 per year when billed annually) and business ($420 when billed annually). Of course, it comes with a 100-year commitment, unlike other Wordpress plans.
[14]
"Whether it's giving a newborn the special gift of a domain and lifetime home on the web, or something you put in your will to make sure your website and story are accessible to future generations, I hope this plan gets people and other companies thinking about building for the long term," said Wordpress CEO Matt Mullenweg.
Or you could just go out and buy a Tesla Model Y, which starts at $36,400 after rebates and before customization.
History lessons
The notion that a tech company can survive 100 years is not far-fetched. Companies that turned 100 this year [15]include The Walt Disney Company, Textron, and Applied Industrial Technologies.
Tech companies AT&T, BT, Siemens, and IBM have all lasted for more than a century.
But while the carriers mentioned above still rely on the same basic principles of shifting electrical impulses over wires, almost nothing else about their businesses and the technologies they wield remains the same as when they were founded.
[16]
Which we mention because Wordpress's offer makes no mention of how it intends to manage its platform – and your website – for a century. The outfit's CMS is currently built on 28-year-old PHP, rated the [17]seventh-most-used language on GitHub in 2022 – down from third place in 2014. Wordpress also employs the open source MySQL relational database, which is controlled by 46-year-old Oracle.
Just last week The Reg reported efforts to have 63-year-old COBOL brought screaming and kicking into the 1990s and beyond with automated porting to Java. So decades-old tech can and will be maintained.
So perhaps Wordpress can develop a roadmap to match its ambitions. Whether the web persists for a century is another matter.
Chances are many customers won't be around to complain if Wordpress can't deliver, and their descendants may not even know what a website was by the time the offer expires. ®
Get our [18]Tech Resources
[1] https://wordpress.com/100-year/
[2] https://wordpress.com/blog/2023/08/25/introducing-the-100-year-plan/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZOzEptjH2hWds0bXTWfnJAAAAY0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZOzEptjH2hWds0bXTWfnJAAAAY0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZOzEptjH2hWds0bXTWfnJAAAAY0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/08/wordpress_plugin_vulnerability/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/15/magento_wordpress_fishpig/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/08/wix_takes_on_wordpress/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/15/magento_wordpress_fishpig/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/20/in_brief_security/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/08/wordpress_plugin_vulnerability/
[12] https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/mortality-and-global-health-estimates/ghe-life-expectancy-and-healthy-life-expectancy
[13] https://wordpress.com/pricing/
[14] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZOzEptjH2hWds0bXTWfnJAAAAY0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_companies_established_in_1923
[16] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZOzEptjH2hWds0bXTWfnJAAAAY0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[17] https://octoverse.github.com/2022/top-programming-languages
[18] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: The sound of whalesong and the smell of incense are strong with this one
Bought by competitors would still count as continuing to trade, although there'd be the risk of these unprofitable customers being sold off to another company that then would go under...
Re: The sound of whalesong and the smell of incense are strong with this one
"Whether it's giving a newborn the special gift"
The Barnum principle - there's one born every minute - seems to have reached marketing in a slightly distorted form.
It's certainly a new twist on unlimited storare, bandwidth etc.
Hill Street Blues memory ...
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0601655/characters/nm0552633
J.D. LaRue : [Farnsworth is trying to sell better protection for the flame on Belker's father's grave but J.D. grabs him by the lapels] Now you take your all-weather wind break, your copper delivery system and you three quarter inch wick and you cram it, Farnsworth! Now, he ain't springing for dime one. Now I've got a perfect view of this cut-rate boneyard of yours from the 36th street overpass every day on my way to work. Alright, now I don't care it's four O'clock in the morning, there's a hurricane blowing out here. I catch the flame on my partner's dad's grave out for one second, and you're gonna be perpetually eternally dead. Not perpetually, not eternally, but perpetually eternally dead! Now you got it?
Hmmm… a Tesla or a Wordpress site for 100 years… if I had to choose, I think I’d just go for the Wordpress site. At least it stands a chance of still working after 10 years and it’s a damn sight more useful.
Wordpress or ???
Being beholden to the whims of Elon Musk?
Anger him and watch Tesla brick your Model 3/Y. IMHO, the man is becoming increasingly unstable. As one commentator put it, 'he's now favoring Putin(like his mentor Trumpo) and threatening to pull the plug on the Ukrainian Military's use of Starlink.
Who would want to 'put in Elon we trust?'
Re: Wordpress or ???
The problem with Starlink is that it was always intended only for civilian use. It's in the AUP.
AFU just thought nobody would care.
So is this a marketing gimmick, or are WordPress short of cash? Or both? Either way, I guess they're not buying into the metaverse hype - which seems to have been supplanted by the AI hype anyway.
I used to use WordPress quite a bit, but gave up on it years ago, party because I wasn't running any sites, but also because of that... Interesting experience. I have a few small sites in mind that I might put up when I have time - maybe over Xmas - but they will be strictly static. Small, hopefully fast, and considerably harder to hack.
"The outfit's CMS is currently built on 28-year-old PHP, rated the seventh-most-used language on GitHub in 2022 – down from third place in 2014. Wordpress also employs the open source MySQL relational database, which is controlled by 46-year-old Oracle."
it's not so much the technology becoming obsolete that I'd challenge - after all a site is just data and that can be migrated. If I were splashing out that money I'd want to see what arrangements they had for putting money into a fund that could pay a hundred years' of hosting costs. But then I don't suppose those who are going to go for this are the sort of people who think about enquiring as to the arrangements to pay for a hundred years of hosting.
Do you remember?
When Joyent sold "lifetime" hosting accounts that ended up lasting six years (basically, until the servers they ran on started to give in)..
https://www.google.ch/search?q=joyent+lifetime+account
Who knows whether Wordpress will exist for decades to come to maintain your domain or even if websites and domain names as we know them will still be something we use in another 100 years time?
The sound of whalesong and the smell of incense are strong with this one
"Whether it's giving a newborn the special gift of a domain and lifetime home on the web…"
Get me a fucking bucket!
As for companies lasting a hundred years: this is very much the exception in America. One or two a generation. The rest are usually bought by their competitors or run into the ground by greedy managers. Or both.