Suzy’s Space: 2013
August
10/8: Soon to be virtually homeless
I am to be without a website host from next week as the one who has kindly hosted me (and a few others) for years has to close for personal reasons. As I don’t have a fixed income, moving to paid hosting is not an option, so it will be back to the insecurity of free hosting, assuming I can find one suitable. I still have my domain name for now (it expires in a couple of years, and trying to renew that will be another hassle). My main personal website is nearly 70 MB – not small anymore, but not huge – and no free site host will allow that much, so I will have to fragment it, as I did when I was on my old Geocities sites. I probably won’t upload my Russian spaceflight site; it is simply too large and I have lost some interest in maintaining it (though I am still interested in Russian spaceflight). My website is my little personal space and I really don’t want to lose my web presence, as obscure as it is.
As an interim measure, I have portal pages at Neocities and WordPress.
I had the idea that all citizens of a country could be given their own government-hosted (taxpayer-funded) personal webspace. This would belong to them and, once they had died, the site would be locked and archived, and kept alive on the Internet for as long as our civilization lasts, as a memento of that individual. Such a site would obviously be provided with some restrictions – such as nothing nasty or illegal allowed – and if a person wanted a domain name they would have to buy it themselves, otherwise the site would have whatever default address a government gave it. But this would be a way of ensuring some permanence on the Internet for individuals. As things are now, if a person dies, their website will vanish once its host and domain name are no longer paid for. Sites such as Archive.org do try to preserve as many sites as they can, but their site mirroring is erratic, as can be seen from my old site linked above – not all pages are saved to their server.