It will be expensive, but this general structure is already used by various organizations with one mission or another.
I think it’s more reasonable to assume that they’ll survive any future calamity (especially something so close as 20-30 years) than to assume that our current age is somehow special.
Lots of kinds of companies have survived major world transformations.
I would never run this kind of website on free hosting (e.g. GitHub pages.) I think it's dangerous to assume that this business model will continue to exist for the next 500 years. It would be much safer to pay the ~$0.02/mo to store and serve your files from an AWS S3 bucket. A $5/mo DigitalOcean VPS would be safer, but probably overkill. I really like the idea of paying $0.24 per year to cover the exact costs of electricity, storage, servers, and bandwidth. These costs might continue to decrease over time, but they can never be 0 (e.g. Landauer's principle [1].)
I don't know how to estimate the cost of a domain name over the next 500 years. It's definitely not going to stay $10 / year forever. Maybe registrars will start charging higher prices or taxes based on the market value of your domain. Or some company will really want to take over your domain. Like Nissan [2] for example.
Ethereum name service (ENS) [3] could be interesting. Pricing [4]:
* 5+ character .eth names: $5 in ETH per year * 4 character .eth names: $160 in ETH per year * 3 character .eth names $640 in ETH per year
The world seems to have decided that names are worth roughly $10/year, for a single planet with a population of 7.9 billion humans. We'll probably be a multi-planet species at some point during the next 500 years. It's hard to imagine what the universe will look like 5,000 or 50,000 years from now. Imagine there's trillions of sentient beings living throughout the universe, and a "universal internet" (even if information still takes many years to propagate throughout the universe.) Maybe names will become far more expensive.
I think the safest option would be to choose a random string of letters and numbers: 2g39pz6jygjd.com + 2g39pz6jygjd.eth. It would still point to a page that includes your name and all of your content, so you'd still be indexed by search engines. And it's very unlikely that someone will start a company called "2g39pz6jygjd" and try to file a trademark.
This kind of random name would probably continue to be worth around $10/year, or perhaps up to $100 / year. It might continue to cost around $0.20 per year to host your static website on AWS S3 (or similar). Bandwidth would be interesting to think about.
Let's say you're trying to keep a blog running forever. Probably a good idea to keep it very simple and use a very basic CSS them, so each page could be around 20 kb. Serving your page to 50,000 visitors would require 1 GB of bandwidth. But let's prepare for a worst case scenario: Everyone on earth visits your website once a day for a month.
7,900,000,000 * 29.53 days (average number of days in a month) * 20 kB = 57709.5 TB. (That's actually way more than I expected! I find it really hard to understand just how many people there are in the world.)
I used this AWS calculator [6]:
* 0.25 GB monthly storage
* 7,900,000,000 * 29.53 days = 233,287,000,000 requests (let's say we serve a single HTML page that includes inline CSS.)
* 57709.5 TB transfered
S3 Standard cost (monthly): $134,680.98 USD. Or $1,616,171.76 per year.
That was just an exercise to figure out the maximum possible cost of hosting a simple web page. It was a fun tangent but we can ignore all of that.
Let's just say it could cost up to $100 per year. Assuming an extremely safe withdrawal rate of 0.5%, you'll need to ask your trust to invest $20,000 (100 / 0.005) in a mix of ETFs, bonds, cryptocurrencies, gold, etc. That should guarantee that you can continue paying for web hosting through the next 1,000 recessions, nuclear wars, ice ages, etc.
[1] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Landauer%27s_principle
[4] https://docs.ens.domains/frequently-asked-questions
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Many solutions here suggesting physical storage mechanisms which defeats the whole purpose of hosting a widely and public accessible document.
A trust would have the finances and most aligned incentives to keep the content online and in a format that is accessible.
Many other solutions involve telling your children to tell their children to ... etc. But again, you have no incentive to give a damn about the whims of someone who died 300 years ago, and it only takes one uncaring child to cut the chain short.
A trust's hefty financial incentives can keep anyones incentives aligned.
It makes sense that there's sexy technical solutions here (we're on Hacker News), but the most important thing is to keep the incentives aligned. That's what a trust is for.
Or even better, diversify, and use multiple different plans, not just lawyers.
