Over the years, there have been various offers made by companies for “lifetime” service. You pay once, and then kick back and enjoy 50, 60, who knows these days, maybe 100 years of service.
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!
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- Has the Biggest Performance Bottleneck in Python Finally Been Slain? - October 8, 2024
I’ll be happy being allowed to renew at last year’s prices. I’ve never kept a domain for two years, let a lone a VPS.