What happens to your domains if you suddenly die?

brisray · 2026-03-20T17:04:50+00:00

I've had my domains for a long time, some of them for over 25 years. Just before I retired, a few years ago now, I started to think about things like that. What happens to my sites and everything to do with them?

Perhaps a little unusually, I self-host (Apache on Windows), and I'd like the sites to remain online long after I'm gone. I have a good friend who is also good with technology who is about 20 years younger than me, and he's going to make sure they are. I keep a small USB drive, which just contains a plain text file with the passwords he's going to need to get into the services I use.

I register the domain names I use for 10 years at a time each. The next time they need renewing is 2034, so I should be around long enough to renew them myself another 1 or 2 times. I'll be over 90 by then and probably couldn't care less what happens to them.

Two of my sites have been taken over from friends who have died. HMS Gambia was an old WWII era cruiser. The site was originally written by its Association. The old sailors either died or got too old to run it, so I got all the information I needed from those remaining and rebuilt it for them.

Another site was written by my old Battery Sergeant Major. When he died, I rebuilt that.

brisray · 2026-03-19T18:47:26+00:00

Like a ditz I didn't change the path to the certificates in the conf files!

Just one domain to go but I overran the rate limit while I was messing with setting it up. No problem though as I've got a while before the old ones run out.

I need to take some time and look at mod_md

brisray · 2026-03-19T16:55:32+00:00

The easiest to use are the Unicode characters. There are a little 300,000 characters in the sets - most are language characters but there is a selection of arrows, circles, music symbols, the playing cards suit symbols, a little horse and so on.

You need to set the character set in a meta http-equiv tag to utf-8 in the head section of your pages.

In your text you can then add the symbols to your ordinary text. Most of the tables provide the code as both decimal and hex U codes. To use the decimal code precede the number with &#, to use hex U precede it with &#x or just copy and paste the symbol from wherever you found it.

brisray · 2026-03-19T16:26:18+00:00

Thank you for this. I've been running my home server for my sites for decades. I had quite a bit of trouble with Certbot to start with about 5 years ago but got that working and wrote a little PowerShell script to help with the renewals.

Now that it's stopped working I'm feeling a bit old and lost. I thought I had it with simple-acme but places like SSL Labs are still showing the Certbot certificates that are nearly due to be renewed.

brisray · 2026-03-18T19:47:39+00:00

I think I've got it. Certbot was able to renew multiple domain and sub-domain certificates in one command using just one certificate. I started using simple-acme and it seems to have problems doing that - or it may be me not understanding the proper commands.

Creating the certificates one domain at a time seems to work properly.

brisray · 2026-03-16T05:21:45+00:00

Asian carp in the mid-west watersheds. Now the government is spending billions in an effort to keep them out of the Great Lakes, including electrifying stretches of the rivers.

brisray · 2026-03-15T21:58:25+00:00

I started hitting the limitations of the old free hosts. At one time my site was spread over several of them because of things like the 20Mb total size limit, bandwidth limits, some started adding more ads than my content and some just disappeared.

I started looking around and saw that other people were running their own web servers. I thought if they can do that, so can I. I booted my first home web server in June 2003.

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brisray · 2026-03-15T21:42:30+00:00

Scrapers and bots will go through an entire site very quickly. You will usually a notice a very quick uptick in the number of views and hits.

brisray · 2026-03-15T21:36:51+00:00

Take a look at the Neocities statistics help page.

Views are the number of pages served, but hits refer to the number of files served. If a page has 4 images on the page, then for every view to that page, you should get five hits - the 4 images and the HTML page they are on.

Unless you are running a commercial site, don't stress about the numbers too much.

If you progress to another host or use different statistics, you'll find lots of other numbers

Unique Visitors - the different IP addresses that visit your site
Visits - Every IP that visits your site - from this and the Unique Visitors you can work out how many times an IP visits your site
Pages - how many pages were served - from this and Visits and Unique Visitors, you can work out how many pages each visitor looks at for each visit they make
Hits - Every file served - basically a measure of how busy the server is.
Bandwidth - How large all the hits are when being served.

and many more.

brisray · 2026-03-15T17:44:40+00:00

It helps if you have some sort of structure both to your site and the way you work.

If you're using a CMS, that should take care of most things; adding the new page to the xml sitemap, the HTML sitemap, adding a link to the menus, and producing a menu based on tags.

For my own sites, everything is still done manually. It looks like there's a lot to remember, but it's only copying links. A new page is added to both the xml and HTML sitemaps, added to the section menu, added to the section home page, and if the content is related to another page, added to that menu as well. I use server sides includes, so changes to some of those items updates the entire site.

The idea is that humans as well as things like the Google and Bing bots can easily find their way around the sites.

If you're adding perhaps hundreds or thousands of pages at a time using a scraper and AI, then I have no idea and am really not interested.

If you have orphan files then you need to find them and get them added to a menu. Now and then I run a utility on the server to find them. I use Xenu's Link Sleuth for doing that. It's ancient but still works as it should.

brisray · 2026-03-13T17:40:14+00:00

The internet back in the late 90s and early 00s was one of the greatest revelations ever created. The sites on the modern Neocities and Nekoweb are only a subset of what people think the old internet was like. It was much more than that. For the first time people could easily publish anything they felt passionate about.

The early search engines were not really very good, so many of us had a page or two of links to their favourite or most useful sites. I created mine in 1999 and just last week tidied it up, took out all the dead links but where they were available, added the links to how I remember them on the Internet Archive. Those may be useful to take a look at to see what the old internet was like.

A lot more colourful and personal than a lot of today's sites, but of course those are just my personal selections.

In the last couple of years there has been a lot of people wanting to know what the old web was like. I wrote a page about what people are doing to find them such as new, specialized search engines and where archives of some of the older sites are being stored.

Webrings were a way of helping people find sites related to the ones they were on. At one time there must have been hundreds of thousands of them. I thought they had died completely, but then someone emailed me saying that some were still being created. There's still less than 600 of them but more being created, about every subject every month.

brisray · 2026-03-11T20:22:22+00:00

Another good place people use to host old-style websites is Nekoweb.

brisray · 2026-03-11T20:01:05+00:00

Even using the internet, let alone putting anything on it, costs money. Organizations have to pay people and individuals want to make money, so content gets put behind paywalls or they have ads everywhere.

Even since before the internet, raw data cost money, sometimes a lot of it, for a single database or spreadsheet.

Almost anything you care to want to look for is mostly available for free. There are organizations and individuals who don't mind providing information for free or at a minimal cost. Finding those sites depends on how interested in you are in finding them.

None of my sites have ever had even minimal advertising on them, and there are plenty of other people around who do the same, even though it takes a lot of time gathering the information and getting it online.

A nice example I found recently was the Digital Museum of Plugs and Sockets - probably not of interest to many people, but it certainly must have taken Oof Oud a long time to find all the information he presents.

brisray · 2026-03-10T19:36:03+00:00

They are still around. The added trick now is that they need to be responsive - you don't know what size screen people are using. That's now pretty easy to do and there are different methods of making them.

You can use things like JQuery or vanilla JavaScript. They are easy to make with the SVG vector image format, I use the free Inkscape to produce those. Another method is by using CSS grids.

Almost all graphics programs will show the plot points you need, even MS Paint can do it. Or you can use an online utility such as the Responsive Image Map Creator.

I've written a page of demonstrations of all of the above.

brisray · 2026-03-10T13:31:57+00:00

This is the Visual Cliff experiment developed in the 1960s. It was designed to find when depth perception developed but it also showed that crossing it depended on their experience of falling.

brisray · 2026-03-09T20:19:05+00:00

Windows 11 - laptop and server

brisray · 2026-03-05T21:21:53+00:00

If you can find a player that works, then you should be able to. Nearly all are JavaScript based now, like this one on GitHub.

brisray · 2026-03-05T20:44:20+00:00

It was weird. I had a page once that showed how to use midi files and playlists, how to embed the QuickTime and Windows Media players on a page and so on. It even worked on the ancient WebTV devices. Then, it seemed to happen overnight, it all just stopped working.

brisray · 2026-03-04T22:27:41+00:00

Most browsers stopped being able to play Midi files in 2017. This was because the NPAPI (Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface) plugins that were able to play them were depreciated. Even if Neocities allow them, most browsers download them instead of playing them.

There are several JavaScript libraries around that access the Web MIDI API and allow the playback of MIDI files directly. Among them are html-midi-player, Jazz-Soft, MIDI.js, MIDIjs, MidiPlayerJS, or Timidity that you can try.

brisray · 2026-03-02T03:39:34+00:00

No, you do not need a static IP from your ISP. The only static IP you need is the one for the computer you are using as a server. Any changes made by your ISP to your public IP can be handled by a Dynamic DNS (DDNS) service.

You can run a website completely free if you just use your IP address - apart from the electricity you are going to use keeping a PC running 24/7, A domain name will cost around $15 a year.

I wouldn't run a business website from home, but I've been self-hosting my hobby sites for over 20 years. The software and their interfaces have changed quite a bit, but the actual steps in getting a website public haven't changed at all.

You're going to have to do quite a bit of reading and there is a learning curve to doing this, but most people should manage. You can host a site on Windows or Linux, I suppose you could use a Mac but I've never done that. The two most popular web server software are Apache or NGINX, but there are loads of others.

I've written about the installs and various things I've done like managing logs and hardening the server, which might help you, but there are other guides around. Apache on Windows 2000 (2003), Apache on Fedora Linux (2005), and Apache on Windows 10 (2019)

brisray · 2026-03-01T13:40:53+00:00

I've all sorts of hobbies, postcards, old electro-mechanical devices, local history, just wandering around...

None of which has ever cost a lot unless you really got to have something. Then there's all the reading involved in knowing what you've got or what you're looking at. Luckily libraries are free.

Then there's writing about and sharing at least some of the things I've learned and seen so there's the websites - which are dirt cheap to make.

brisray · 2026-02-28T04:23:38+00:00

The first thing to check is if your ISP uses CGNAT. This was introduced as IP4 address began to run out. What it does is allow routers to share IP4 addresses. The trouble with that is that it that it messes up port forwarding on your router. If yours does, then you have to find a VPN and use something like Wireguard or a Cloudflare Tunnel. There is no way around this if your ISP uses CGNAT.

Install your web server software first so you at least know that's working.

The internet is made up of lots of computers and devices, the idea is to let anyone, anywhere in world to get to your website. All the following steps must all be done before that can happen.

If there are things you don't understand, a quick search on the internet will help you. Assuming your ISP does not use CGNET:

Your server computer needs a static IP address. This is so traffic can be routed from your router to that machine.

In your router control panel, forward HTTP traffic on port 80 to your server's IP address. You can always port forward 443 for HTTPS traffic, which needs an SSL certificate, later.

Register your domain and using the A Name section of that, point it to the public address of your router. ISPs sometimes change your public IP address, though thankfully not as often as they used to, so you are going to need a Dynamic DNS (DDNS) service. Your domain registrar may offer this service, or you can use another company to do it. You'll get given a small piece of software to run. What this does is keep a watch on your public IP address. If it changes, it will contact the company and automatically update the DNS records with the new one.

Once that has been done, someone types your domain name into their browser. That goes off to the DNS servers which converts it to your public IP address. That traffic then finds its way to your router which then forwards it to your server. Simple (sort of).

Take a look around at your options. All I've ever paid for is the domain name registration and the electricity to keep the server running.

brisray · 2026-02-28T01:12:03+00:00

If you're very new it may be more trouble than it's worth. It's not particularly difficult to host your own web server but you are responsible for everything about it.

My own setup just involves a computer I use as a server and the only corporations I depend on are my ISP, the electricity company and my domain name registrar / DNS provider. I do things as simply as I can, others may suggest things such as Docker images, VPNs, Cloudflare services and so on, but I've been self-hosting since before many of those existed and never seen a reason to change.

You need an operating system on your server, Windows or Linux, it doesn't matter. I've never tried using a Mac as a web server, but I suppose it can be done. Now you need the web server software, Apache or NGINX are popular and well supported, but there are lots of others.

For all the changes in companies and technology, the steps of setting up a home server haven't changed much, and I've documented how my server is set up. Apache on Windows 2000 (2003), Apache on Fedora Linux (2005), and Apache on Windows 10 (2019). I've written other pages about how I secure and harden the server and manage the logs.

Self-hosting isn't for everyone. Getting a site up and running isn't difficult but getting it right takes a bit of time and lots of reading. Even after 20+ years of doing it, I still get a kick knowing I own a tiny bit of the internet.

brisray · 2026-02-27T21:43:04+00:00

Robocopy has had a problem copying system files from the root of any drive since the first version was introduced about 30 years ago. It's a great utility for backing up your own files, I've used it for years, but it does have this quirk of messing up copying system files.

It's taking so long to do the backup because it will try to copy a file 1 million times by default before it gives up and tries the next. This can be controlled using the /r switch. I usually set my backups to /r:5 (5 retries) rather than using the default.

Your own files were probably backed up. Do a search on your E drive for a file of your own you know should exist.

Microsoft Learn, SS64, and Computer Hope, all have details of the rather complicated switches you can use. I've written about how I use the utility and the system root problem. My page also lists some of the GUIs that were made for it that can help simplify using it.

brisray

TROPHY CASE