Needless to say, the skepticism surrounding these offers is often intense, and the experience with them backs it up.

The problems are obvious: how can $100 or even $1000 in 2022 be adequate to profitably serve VMs in 2072?  In reality, it would take millions to truly ensure that a VM is operational 50 years from now.

However, it’s also fair to say you’re not going to want it 50 years from now.  50 years ago, a top of the line computer system was a 24-bit system with memory measured in kilobytes.  How useful is a 1GB VPS going to be in 2072 when you need at least 640 petabytes of RAM to do anything useful?  I have a 32MB thumb drive in a drawer, which was handy in the 90s but will probably never be inserted into a USB port again.

So any lifetime deal is really an analysis of:

• How long am I really going to use this?  I’d say that anything beyond 10 years is pretty suspect given the pace of change.
• Is the provider likely to stay around that long?

And the you decide if it’s worth it.  There are “lifetime” deals I’ve signed up for because they were a good deal on a 2- or 3-year timeframe, and anything beyond that was gravy.

Which brings us to @MikePT‘s birthday!  MikePT is a fantastic moderator on LowEndTalk and has been with the community a long time.  His televised code-a-thon a few years ago was an amazing event where he had a camera on his crew for 24 hours while they worked on community orders.

He’s also the proprietor of MyW and posted some offers earlier this month.  I checked and stock is still available on some!

Some examples:

• Shared hosting 2GB space and unlimited bandwidth in Los Angeles, Germany, or Singapore: 15€ LIFETIME!
• Reseller hosting with 25GB space, unlimited bandwidth in the same three cities: 50€ LIFETIME!

Naturally, these are DirectAdmin and there are other deals, too.  Now, if you’re 18 and you live to 118, are these servers still going to be up and running in 2122?  I don’t know.  But I think yo’ll get enough time on them to make it worth these tiny investments!

If you’re interested, jump on over to the LowEndTalk thread and score!