Poll Content management and hosting outfit Wordpress wants to sell you some legacy technology: a domain name and website it will keep alive for 100 years, for $38,000.

"A domain is your most valuable digital asset," opens WordPress's 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 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.

For 100 years.

Security is promised to be "unstoppable," which presumably excludes the third-party plug-ins that so often include complications such as backdoors and make running Wordpress such an - ahem - unique experience.

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 World Health Organization.

The yearly $380 places the plan's 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.

"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 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.

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 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. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2023/08/28/wordpress_100_year_plan/