As founder Manton Reece has written about in a chapter of his book, we think a lot about how to keep web pages online. At Micro.blog, we have a simple policy:
If you have ever paid for hosting with us, and you haven’t violated our terms of service or community guidelines, we keep your blog online forever, even after you’ve stopped paying for your subscription.
This policy makes link rot a little less likely. Long after you’ve stopped blogging regularly, your blog may still be getting the occasional visitor who found it via search or from a link on someone else’s website.
Of course, you can delete your blog at any time if you no longer wish Micro.blog to host it.
Additional steps you can take to preserve your content:
- On the Design page, enable the “Save new posts to Internet Archive” checkbox. With this enabled, every time you post to your blog, Micro.blog will notify the Internet Archive so that it’s available in the Wayback Machine.
- On the Posts page, click “…” to see export options for your blog. It’s a good idea to regularly backup a copy of your blog every few months.
For Micro.blog Premium subscribers, we also have a feature built into our bookmarks that can archive other people’s web pages. This can help when someone else’s blog goes offline, but you’ve linked to their post and want to preserve a copy. It’s a little like a miniature version of the Internet Archive.