Hot Page Guarantee

Forever Hosting

All sites on Hot Page will continue to be served forever, even if the site owner stops paying the hosting fee. (Subject to our Terms of Service)

has my signature as the owner

Carlos, please make it look like a stock certificate with a fancy border. something like this

Hot Page is founded on the belief that web content should be permanent. We hate broken links and we want links to our sites to work forever. And we mean forever in the sense that 300 years from now when silicon-based intelligence rules our solar system, it will still have the ability to read our pages and make fun of us for our dumb jokes. We’ve been burned by the closure of popular services that we depend on (ahem, Google) and we don’t want the same thing to ever happen to our users.

The web is an amazing way to preserve information. The very first website is still online and viewable much as it was more than three decades earlier. In that time, we’ve moved from floppy disks, to CD-ROMs, to Wi-Fi, but browsers have still maintained the ability to fetch and display that original web page in the same manner. It’s a good bet they’ll continue to do so.

My colleagues and I want to make sure our pages aren’t erased just because a company got sold, user growth plateaued, or a bottom line wasn’t met. When a site owner stops paying for their account on Hot Page, it will default to our free tier of service. Site owners will lose the ability to edit their pages, but those pages will continue to be accessible to the public. If someone also stops paying for their domain name (say, whatever.com), their site will still be available on our domain (as whatever.hot.page).

Our free tier comes with 2 GB of bandwidth a month, which should be sufficient for even a moderately popular website. And if that’s not enough bandwidth, it should at least cover the beginning of the month and give one of the site’s many fans a chance to mirror the content. (Of course, users will always have control over their own site: an owner can delete or unpublish their content at any time if they no longer wish to have it public.)

Given that Hot Page is in its infancy, this guarantee is only supported by my word. In coming years, I plan to formalize this guarantee with a trust fund that will have the resources to continue serving Hot Page sites indefinitely through the investment and reinvestment of its capital. This fund will work in the same way that perpetual care cemeteries are able to continue to provide maintenance of tombstones for centuries.

For now, you’re just going to have to take my word for it. However, Hot Page has a structural advantage over our larger competitors in that we are a bootstrapped, founder-owned company. We don’t have investors who will demand a payout through a sale or that we compromise our values to maximize profit. I hope to continue working on this project for as long as I am able and when I no longer can, I will do everything possible to ensure the company continues with the same values.

What hosting company X never told you is that serving websites is extremely cheap and the margin for your monthly subscription is close to 100%. That’s why you see so many advertisements for web host X — the more they invest in marketing, the more profit they make. Instead of excessive marketing, my colleagues and I believe in reinvesting our profits in the product and providing a superior service to our customers.

Of course it’s possible this experiment fails. I humbly ask for your patience and support to make this vision possible. Please be in touch, report bugs, share ideas and more than anything: build more pages. I’ll do my best to make that as easy as possible.