free hosting

[Jaguar57]

I pay for hosting of my html pages now but have pages and spreadsheets I want to "live forever" after my death.
I had put them up on a free service but later couldn't find them when I used Google. Then I found out that most free hosts cause the pages to not be search friendly.
Is there a service that doesn't have that problem?
(My page has #1 ranking on Google for the right search words)

 

[maflynn]

Then I found out that most free hosts cause the pages to not be search friendly.

I hate to state the obvious, but you get what you pay for, and since free hosting isn't getting a direct revenue stream from you, you're not going to see some services that those who pay get.

 

[jonnysods]

Pay me to host your site and content, write me into your will and I'll keep the site up!

 

[Jaguar57]

What part of this did you not understand?
"have pages and spreadsheets I want to "live forever" after my death"

How am I supposed to keep paying you from beyond the grave?

Never mind everybody. Either no one knows of a search engine friendly host or ignorance is #1.
I think I found a site about my hobby where I can post all the info.

 

[SeaFox]

What part of this did you not understand?
"have pages and spreadsheets I want to "live forever" after my death"
How am I supposed to keep paying you from beyond the grave?

You pre-pay for a specified period of time prior to your death, and the pages remain up after that time.

Never mind everybody. Either no one knows of a search engine friendly host or ignorance is #1.

Maybe you highly exaggerate the perceived value of these papers, too.
Prediction: When you're pushing up daisies no one will give a flying flip about your documents anymore, and if they do they will be close family and friends whom you can bequeath them to on a well-known medium that can last for hundreds of years if cared for -- paper.

 

[Les Kern]

What part of this did you not understand?
How am I supposed to keep paying you from beyond the grave?

You can write things in your will to take care of long-term obligations.
Something like "Pay Mr. Jonnysods the sum of $XX.XX per month to keep alive my web site that nobody will ever visit, until such time that he dies, then said stipulation would apply to his designate in perpetuity, until such time the universe comes to an end and all that will be left are my mysterious files which by that time will be unrecognizable anyway since evolution will render them pretty much invisible."
I'm not a lawyer, but maybe something like that.

 

[Jaguar57]

SeaFox, what a stupid and insensitive thing to say ("no one will give a flying flip about your documents anymore")

For your information I get 70,000 hits a month on just one of those three pages.
Why don't you think before opening your stupid mouth?

 

[SeaFox]

Why don't you think before opening your stupid mouth?

I'm am thinking -- I'm thinking over the sum of human history there have been millions of scholars, artists, musicians, and politicians that were more famous than you in their own time, and after their death, nobody read their documents either, outside of a small number of historians and academics in the same field. Millions of people who know their name only recall it from some undergrad course they had to take and promptly stopped caring about after they entered the workforce.

The ones who really cared that their deeds remained known were willing to pay the costs to see that it happened.

If your contribution to the world is so great -- write a book. And if it's that good it will get added to the Library of Congress.

Otherwise, put your papers in a bank safe deposit box and stick it on auto-pay with your retirement account. The contents of the box will become part of your estate, and you can have your executor tasked with sending them to whoever should get them afterwards. But don't be shocked if they end up in a box in an attic and untouched until a generation later when someone else throws them away.

 

[Jaguar57]

book? it's 3 spreadsheets with lots of complicated math formulas at work.
If my work only helped one person a year then that would have significant meaning to me. But you never took the time to ask, you just jumped on your bandwagon about the most famous people in history. I'm not out to change the world, just help a few people. 70,000 hits a month is way more than I ever dreamed for this.

Retirement? crap, I do good to pay the bills each month.

 

[SeaFox]

For your information I get 70,000 hits a month on just one of those three pages.

Sounds like these documents are already on the Internet and people can find them just fine. Why can't they stay where they are?

book? it's 3 spreadsheets with lots of complicated math formulas at work.

If these documents are used by people at your job and are of such use, why doesn't your employer want to just host them itself? Getting back to the "value of your work", without knowing the type of mathematics we are talking about, do your really think your three spreadsheets are that unique? Do your truly believe that if your spreadsheets ceased to exist no one else would ever create a similar document? You're not exactly the only authority on numbers.

I made a site once to help out at my work. It was a website that gave technical information on equipment from several sources in one easier-to-navigate place. I made it for the use of myself and the team I worked with. At some point it spread -- I don't know why, I just recall my co-worker (and girlfriend at the time) pointing out to me a whiteboard in a completely different department that had the URL of my site scribbled on it on a list of resources.

That site is gone -- there are many sites that offer similar information to mine. Some are not as good as mine, some are much richer in content. No one misses my site for that, they can find other resources.

I made a completely different site that hosted information on local restaurants and their weekly specials for my co-workers and I to make getting lunch easier. Last year I got a text message from one of them asking if the site was still up. I left that job four years ago and my group had been disbanded for other areas two years prior to that, and he was still looking for my website in 2016!

That website is also gone. It and the previous one were hosted in my free .Mac webspace. At some point Apple decided they wanted customers who consumed content more than customers who created it, and axed that feature even though the webspace was taken from the now-iCloud storage I still have today.

If my work only helped one person a year then that would have significant meaning to me. But you never took the time to ask, you just jumped on your bandwagon about the most famous people in history. I'm not out to change the world, just help a few people. 70,000 hits a month is way more than I ever dreamed for this.

I have a tutorial I wrote, with pictures (screenshots in this case) posted in an online forum to help people out with a particular topic. A couple months back I revisited this multi-post forum thread only to find all my pictures were missing. I went to my free Imageshack account, which I have had for several years, and found all my images were gone. Imageshack had ended their free tier service at some point several months ago and removed my files from the web, considering them abandoned. They did not send me an email notifying me of this change of service. If I hadn't happened to check that forum thread it might have never known the images were gone.

It looked like my images might still be on the server in some way when I logged into my account and only then got the message about the change in how they run their busines, so I emailed them asking for a link to download my image archive as they were supposed to offer me back before the changeover. "I'll just post the images to the Imgur account I have now", I thought. They never replied back. All those picture, drawings, and other things I had posted for this reason or that are gone because they were hosted on a service that received no revenue directly from me so they had no real obligations to keep my content up.

Does Facebook let people host files? (I dunno, I don't use Facebook) They certainly let people host pictures. If these documents are static in content you can create PDFs or even just high-resolution PNG images of them and stick them up there. Facebook is great about not letting stuff get deleted -- even when the owner wants it to be (LOL). Your Facebook account can be converted to a memorial account after you die, preserved for all eternity at no cost to you*. Of course, people used to think MySpace would be around forever, too. It will probably be gone in 5 years.

Take it from me, I have experience in this...

* - as long as Facebook remains solvent.

 

[Jaguar57]

>Sounds like these documents are already on the Internet and people can find them just fine. Why can't they stay where they are?

Once I'm gone my ex will have access to my debit card and will drain everything within a year. Well to keep a site up you have to pay every 6 or 12 months and also pay for the domain name every so often.

>If these documents are used by people at your job and are of such use, why doesn't your employer want to just host them itself? Getting back to the "value of your work", without knowing the type of mathematics we are talking about, do your really think your three spreadsheets are that unique? Do your truly believe that if your spreadsheets ceased to exist no one else would ever create a similar document? You're not exactly the only authority on number

My spreadsheets apply to a certain hobby (not work related) and they are unique. Others have attempted something similar but my efforts have exceeded them all. I'm no genius although I have an IQ of 117 and yes others could do what I've done theoretically but like I said I've made the best versions so far. It would just be a shame to see them pass away into oblivion. The best that any of us to hope for is for something unique from us to continue on.

 

[kiwipeso1]

I pay for hosting of my html pages now but have pages and spreadsheets I want to "live forever" after my death.
I had put them up on a free service but later couldn't find them when I used Google. Then I found out that most free hosts cause the pages to not be search friendly.
Is there a service that doesn't have that problem?
(My page has #1 ranking on Google for the right search words)

Try to not die in the next couple of years, there is something I'm working on called stormcloud which solves this problem, along with several other problems associated with free services and general internet sharing.
[doublepost=1468840767][/doublepost]

>Sounds like these documents are already on the Internet and people can find them just fine. Why can't they stay where they are?

Once I'm gone my ex will have access to my debit card and will drain everything within a year. Well to keep a site up you have to pay every 6 or 12 months and also pay for the domain name every so often.

>If these documents are used by people at your job and are of such use, why doesn't your employer want to just host them itself? Getting back to the "value of your work", without knowing the type of mathematics we are talking about, do your really think your three spreadsheets are that unique? Do your truly believe that if your spreadsheets ceased to exist no one else would ever create a similar document? You're not exactly the only authority on number

My spreadsheets apply to a certain hobby (not work related) and they are unique. Others have attempted something similar but my efforts have exceeded them all. I'm no genius although I have an IQ of 117 and yes others could do what I've done theoretically but like I said I've made the best versions so far. It would just be a shame to see them pass away into oblivion. The best that any of us to hope for is for something unique from us to continue on.

Assuming you don't die before my stormcloud system is up and going, this will not be a problem at all to host on an equivalent free domain system which will run without a hassle for fiat currency on an ongoing basis.

 

[RoyWoods]

Never mind everybody. Either no one knows of a search engine friendly host or ignorance is #1.

There is no such thing as a 'search engine friendly host'. I have been doing SEO and SEM for 10+ years. It's about your website and on-page setup more than your host. Obviously if you want to rank in the US, you need to be on US hosting and no be on a 'bad' IP block but that's pretty much it.

The best way to keep your websites online would be to setup a trust and keep it funded to keep your website online for 100 years. The only issue you would run into is if the hosting company went under or some kind of error happened and no one would be able to fix it.

Another way would be to open source it and put your entire site on GitHub. That way anyone can rehost your stuff if they wanted.

 

[Garrod]

...just help a few people. 70,000 hits a month is way more than I ever dreamed for this...

70000 people per month isn't actually a lot. As for 'free' hosting, whack your stuff onto https://archive.org/index.php or suchlike...whilst that still exists at least.

 

[kamalds]

book? it's 3 spreadsheets with lots of complicated math formulas at work.
If my work only helped one person a year then that would have significant meaning to me. But you never took the time to ask, you just jumped on your bandwagon about the most famous people in history. I'm not out to change the world, just help a few people. 70,000 hits a month is way more than I ever dreamed for this.

Retirement? crap, I do good to pay the bills each month.

I have over 74 websites and I can tell you that if you want to host your content forever, the best way to do it would be putting it on wordpress.com (Free one). They would not charge you a penny. On the old domain, do a 301 redirect including for each post to tell Google that you have moved the pages to a new domain (which will be xxxxxxx.wordpress.com).

 

[MacDawg]

I don't know about anyone else, but I'd like to see these 3 amazing spreadsheets
Care to post the links?

 

[kiwipeso1]

>Sounds like these documents are already on the Internet and people can find them just fine. Why can't they stay where they are?

Once I'm gone my ex will have access to my debit card and will drain everything within a year. Well to keep a site up you have to pay every 6 or 12 months and also pay for the domain name every so often.

>If these documents are used by people at your job and are of such use, why doesn't your employer want to just host them itself? Getting back to the "value of your work", without knowing the type of mathematics we are talking about, do your really think your three spreadsheets are that unique? Do your truly believe that if your spreadsheets ceased to exist no one else would ever create a similar document? You're not exactly the only authority on number

My spreadsheets apply to a certain hobby (not work related) and they are unique. Others have attempted something similar but my efforts have exceeded them all. I'm no genius although I have an IQ of 117 and yes others could do what I've done theoretically but like I said I've made the best versions so far. It would just be a shame to see them pass away into oblivion. The best that any of us to hope for is for something unique from us to continue on.

While there is indeed no point saying that they can't be replicated by the genius of others,
there are plenty of efforts about the long term storage of documents with existing proven technology.
I myself lead such a project to permanently store documents online in a variety of fail safe methods based on relatively simple mathematics that even my associate who I assisted with a briefing on his doctoral topic in maths can understand.

This permanent storage can be done in my project with no concern for disappearance of you work, as it is designed to stay online globally so long as 3 devices are connected to the network.
As this is expected to be highly reliable for years on end, and easily to reload in case of outage, this should have at least a century of operation.

 

[raison]

OP, github pages and google sheets for your spreadsheets are your best options.

Of course the is no such thing as forever. Google and github might change their plans in future like closing their free services, or they might not even exist, who knows?

Make sure the Internet Archive has your site indexed too.