Preparing for your digital afterlife

Are you prepared for your digital afterlife? Probably not. In this fun, intriguing and serious series, I explore hosting your website after death and preparing your digital assets and digital estate plan.

Read the series here: Preparing Digital Assets for Your Eventual Death.

I first pitched this series to Tuts+ because I thought it was an interesting, under-reported topic. After completing the first two episodes, I learned that I had a treatable, operable, likely benign brain tumor which will require surgery. My prognosis is very good, but those first few days were intermittently terrifying and poignant—the topics explored in this series became very real to me overnight. I hope you’ll take my experience to heart, read mindfully, and consider taking action to get your act together.

Please also check out my personal essay: What We Can Learn From My Brain Tumor.

Here’s an excerpt:

All of my Tuts+ tutorials thus far have had successful endings… until now. Every tutorial I’ve published here has always succeeded in guiding readers through the process of performing some task or lesson. However, this time I’ve failed. This is the first time I set out to write a tutorial to describe how to do something and hit a brick wall.

I hope you find this journey as interesting as I did nonetheless.

It turns out hosting WordPress (or any website) after your death has a variety of unexpected complexities. There is no easy, reliable solution available to address this problem. It’s a gaping hole that we as technologists should start thinking more about—especially because all of us are going to die, some of us unexpectedly sooner than we’d like or planned for.

Posted by Jeff Reifman

Jeff is a technology consultant based in the Pacific Northwest.