It is just setting it up. Also sometimes people just lose interest in it. Even a couple of bucks a month would be not worth it. Then if you stand it up and 'forget about it'. What happens when your CC expires? It goes away. You do not care anymore so it is probably not something you care to fix.
For me 50-100 bucks a year is not something that is that big of deal. But if I have totally lost interest in it. It would be on the list of expenses to get rid of. It is one of those things a lot of clean up your financial problems people talk about. Look at all of those little charges. They add up to decent money sometimes. Not saying that happened here. But it probably does happen?
Even having to pay pennies a month is something that has to be maintained (do you remember to update your credit card info, are the emails correct, etc).
It would be nice for something like the Internet Archive to offer "perpetual hosting" where you pay upfront for enough to fund hosting "forever". $100 would generate $1 a year in interest which would be enough to host small data.
> Q: Do I get interest on my deposit? A: No[, but...] We periodically reevaluate this situation, because we think a web account that runs forever purely off of its own interest is a pretty cool idea.
NFSNet also has an interesting part in their FAQ in response to the question If I think services you host are currently unavailable due to lack of funds; is there anything I can do?, they outline a process whereby third-parties can fund a hosted service by creating an account themselves, depositing funds into their own account (NFSNet services are prepaid instead of billed after the fact), and then submitting a manual (but free) request to transfer those funds to the original accountholder based on the service's domain name. I've always thought this was interesting because in theory someone could set up a community, disappear, and then the community could step up to keep it funded long enough for the person to get out of the hospital/be rescued at sea/etc, so long as the infrastructure is solid enough to remain operational without being attended to (not vulnerable to exploits, etc.)
They've also got a policy where if the member who operates the service is a willing participant, they can publish their NearlyFreeSpeech.Net account ID and have donors add funds to cover 100% of service costs via automated transfers. <https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/faq#Lifeboat>
Surprisingly, endowedhosting.com was available, so I bought it. If IA or comparable ever decided to offer such a service, I’d happily hand the name over to them.
>Website Lets You Send a Post-Rapture E-Mail to Friends 'Left Behind'
>If millions of Christians suddenly disappear from the face of the Earth as the opening act for Armageddon, Threat Level thinks most nonbelievers will be too busy freaking the hell out to check their e-mail. But if they do log in, now they can be treated to some post-Rapture needling from their missing friends and loved ones, courtesy of web startup YouveBeenLeftBehind.com.
[...]
Good thing the sysadmins are loving trustworthy Christians:
>Users can also upload up to 150 megabytes of documents, which will be protected by an unidentified encryption algorithm until the Rapture, then released to up to 12 nonbelievers of your choice. The site recommends that you use that storage to house sensitive financial information.
>"In the encrypted portion of your account you can give them access to your banking, brokerage, hidden valuables, and powers of attorneys," the site says. "There won't be any bodies, so probate court will take seven years to clear your assets to your next of kin. Seven years, of course, is all the time that will be left. So, basically the Government of the Antichrist gets your stuff, unless you make it available in another way."
There was a pretty good Law and Order episode where one of those sites accidentally triggered, sent an email confessing to somebody's crimes prematurely, which led to an unfortunate chain of events and salty remarks.
>The owner of a Rapture website is killed by a man working to return Soviet Jews to Israel to fulfill Biblical prophecy. However, the killer seeks shelter at the Iranian embassy, leaving the DA's office in an unenviable position.
