How long does an online memorial stay online
2 min read
Every service says "forever". It is the least informative word on any of these websites, because nobody selling you a page can guarantee the existence of their own company.
What you can assess is the shape of the risk, and it comes in three forms.
Risk one: the payment stops
This is the most likely failure by a wide margin, and it applies to any subscription.
A memorial is meant to outlast the person who set it up. A subscription is a recurring charge on a card that will expire, on an account that will eventually belong to someone who has died or moved on. When it fails, nothing dramatic happens — an email goes to an address nobody reads, and some weeks later the page is gone.
Nobody is at fault, and nobody finds out until a grandchild scans a code.
A single payment removes this category of failure entirely. It is the main argument for it.
Risk two: the company stops
Smaller than the first, and permanent when it happens.
What separates a company that handles it well from one that does not is whether it has thought about it in advance. Two things to look for:
- An export you can run today. If you can download everything — photographs, video, text — then the worst case is an inconvenience rather than a loss. If there is no export, you are holding a rental.
- A stated archive policy. What happens to the data if the business closes. A real answer names a mechanism. An absent answer means nobody has considered it.
Risk three: the address stops resolving
Quieter, and the one nobody asks about.
A QR code is an address. Companies change domains, get acquired and migrate platforms. The sticker on the stone is fine; the address behind it is not.
Ask whether the link a code points to is one the company controls permanently, and whether old links are kept working after any change. A company that keeps redirects for its old URLs is a company that intends to be around.
The four questions
Before paying anything:
- Is this a one-off payment or a recurring one?
- Can I export everything, right now, without asking?
- What happens to the pages if the company closes?
- Do old links keep working after a change of platform?
Four answers tell you more than any number of years printed on a homepage.
What forevr does
One payment, no subscription, so nothing has to keep happening for the page to survive. Export from the settings of any memorial, at any time, without asking anyone. Hosting in the European Union. The guarantee on the physical sticker runs to ten, twenty or thirty years depending on the plan — a figure about the material, which is a different promise from the one about the page, and worth keeping separate in your head.