WordPress, a company that’s been around for 20 years, now sells 100-year-old domains. This means that your blog or website is likely to outlive you.
The company announced in a post on its blog that this 100 year plan It is ideal for families to keep their history online and for founders to document their company’s journey.
While the promise of preserving digital assets for a century sounds promising, it comes with a one-time cost of $38,000. In exchange, WordPress will provide a domain with 100-year registration, automatic backups to multiple servers and even the Internet Archive, advanced ownership and hosting tools, and 24/7 support.
WordPress doesn’t mention in its post how it plans to keep domains and backups up-to-date with the ever-changing internet landscape or what happens to domains if a company decides to shut down the software for some reason.
Technology companies like IBM, AT&T, and Siemens have lasted for more than 100 years, but their offerings have changed radically over time. Modern computing and the Internet are a few decades old, and it is uncertain what the future of websites will look like. It will be interesting to see how WordPress evolves this project with the web.
“Whether it’s giving a newborn the special gift of a domain and a home for life on the web, or something to put in your will to make sure your website and your story is accessible to future generations, I hope this plan gets other people and companies thinking about it,” Matt said. “Building for the Long Term,” said Möllnweg, CEO of WordPress, in a statement.
In the past few months, WordPress has been trying to launch new products and features to adapt to the current environment. In March, Automattic, the owner of WordPress, acquired an ActivityPub plugin to integrate blogging with Fediverse. In June, the company launched an AI writing assistant to assist users in the writing process. At the same time, it launched a paid newsletter product to compete with Substack.