The big picture: WordPress' latest sales pitch reads more like an ad for life insurance than an attempt to sell you a long-term plot of digital land on the Internet, but that is exactly what it is. But at $38,000 up front, is it worth it?
The company's 100-Year Plan promises to "safeguard your online legacy." According to WP, the plan is perfect for families looking to preserve digital assets like stories, photos, and videos, founders that want to document their company's past, present, and future, and individuals seeking a "stable, flexible, and customized online home."
With the 100-Year Plan, you'll get a domain that is valid for a full century alongside managed WordPress hosting with unmetered bandwidth. The bundle also comes with 24/7 premier support and enhanced ownership protocols.
The WordPress song and dance further notes the fact that they maintain multiple backups of content across geographically distributed data centers. They also automatically submit your site to the Internet Archive if it is public and provide an optional locked mode should you so desire.
It can all be yours for a one-time fee of $38,000, which works out to $380 a year or $31.66 a month. For a quick comparison, WordPress currently offers a hosting package for $25 per month and a domain service for $8 a month for a total of $33/month.
A century is a long time, especially given the rate of modern technological advancement. The Internet is bound to look vastly different in 100 years, if it even still exists at all. It is entirely plausible that by that point, we will have moved on to a means of communication and information sharing that is even faster and more efficient than today's Internet.
A hundred years is also a long time for a company to keep a promise. Again, who knows what could happen to WordPress between now and then. What if they go bankrupt in 50 years? And odds are, you are not going to be around to even know if they fulfilled their promise anyway.
Image credit: Fikret Tozak