WordPress, a company that has been around for 20 years, is now selling domains with a 100-year registration length. That means your blog or website will probably live longer than you.
The company announced in a blog post that this 100-year plan is ideal for families to preserve their history on the internet and for founders to document their company’s journey.
While the promise of keeping digital assets for a century sounds promising, it comes at the cost of a $38,000 one-time payment. In exchange, WordPress will provide a domain with 100-year-long registration, automatic backup to multiple servers, and even the Internet Archive, advanced ownership and hosting tools, and round-the-clock support.
WordPress doesn’t mention in its post how it plans to keep domains and backups updated with the ever-changing internet landscape or what happens to the domains if the company decides to shut down the program for some reason.
Tech companies such as IBM, AT&T, and Siemens have lasted for more than 100 years, but their offerings have changed drastically over time. Modern computing and the internet are a few decades old and it’s 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 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,” WordPress CEO Matt Mullenweg said in a statement.
In the past few months, WordPress has tried to launch new products and features to adapt to the current environment. In March, WordPress-owner Automattic acquired an ActivityPub plug-in to integrate blogs with the Fediverse. In June, the company launched an AI writing assistant to help users with the writing process. At the same time, it launched a paid newsletter product rivaling Substack.
