A lot of folks suggest getting your own domain name for having control over your online presence but the question that I have always had is what would happen to them when I die?
Wouldn’t the domains eventually expire and anyone else would be able to register it and access my email attached to that domain? With that email, they can theoretically get into all my accounts which don’t have 2FA on (a lot of the sites just don’t have the option to turn on 2FA) via the ‘Forgot my password’ services?
Similarly, if I have a blog or website that I have poured my heart and soul into for my entire life, wouldn’t that just go down forever when the domain expires? Maybe services like The Internet Archive would help in that regard but I don’t know how many people are actively searching for an archived version of a website when they can’t access it on it’s actual domain.
I understand that after I die, all of this wouldn’t by my concern and wouldn’t matter but I still think about this a lot.
To the people who have their own domain, email and/or blogs, what are your thoughts on this?
When my dad died, no one renewed his domain, [last name].com, and some domain squatter bought it. A few years later the squatter noticed that I owned [last name].net and offered to sell it to me. I didn’t respond and I guess they figured out that an obscure last name isn’t worth anything and let it expire. I should probably buy it.
The ol’ Uno reverso countersquat technique, I like it
There was an article around here yesterday that confirm your thoughts.
They did got access to old email and services via those email
Yeah, I made this post after reading that article. There is clearly a problem with how domains and their renewals are managed. I’m not sure what a solution would look like, though.
Throw lot of money and buy whole TLD for life. /j
I was actually going to do that for my domain, sadly 100yr registration is very expensive with vanity ones
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I started blogging in 1997 and still do today, and I would love for my writing and posts to live on after me, so I’ve been thinking more and more about this issue… Right now my idea is to write up a document about what needs to happen for it to continue, and hope my children consider it a worthwhile effort.
If you want your content to live beyond you, you would need to set up some kind of trust to conserve it. Some investments that would make enough money to continue to pay for maintenance, probably someone would need to keep an eye on it too as hosting companies won’t last forever, so things will need moving eventually.
Generally practically nothing we do lasts forever though, you can take measures to resist that for a while, but ultimately nearly everything is forgotten
One idea I had was to randomly put stuff into content that might pay off later. Write random sentences that say things like “saw Tom today, people are saying his brother is the chosen one.” Or “lot of traffic today, heard it was because this guy was doing crazy miracles and declared himself king”.
Tactius is going to be read forever because he interviewed a Christian one time and wrote one sentence.
The email is stored on a server. The domain DNS points the appropriate URL at your matching email configuration. Someone registering your domain doesn’t give them information about the previous DNS configuration, name servers, and certainly not your server cpanel login credentials. So no, they wouldn’t get access to your emails. They could re-create the same email address using their new setup, but all of the previous email contents would still be sitting on your server. Someone could potentially use the matching email address to retrieve account resets from services you’re registered to, but they would need to know your exact email address and there would probably still be some additional roadblocks.
Regarding your blog and that sort of stuff. If you want it to persist after you die, then you should will it to someone, along with renewal information, admin access, and probably some money to cover the expenses. If you use a password manager like LastPass then you can set someone up as an emergency contact, and they can retrieve all of your logins after you die. They basically send a retrieval request, and if you don’t respond to block it in the given time period, it allows them to log in as if they were you.
Most domain and web hosting plans expire when no one pays to renew them.
One thing you could do is put your work under a free license. That would allow people to copy it which should make sure that your work will be preserved by others.
Depends on which country you live and which country you die.
