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You are about to bond a web address to a piece of granite that will outlive everyone reading this. It is fair to ask what we intend to do about that, and most companies selling something like this will not tell you.

The honest version first

A single payment cannot fund a website forever. Anybody who tells you it can is either not thinking about it or hoping you are not. Servers, a domain renewal, and someone to read the review queue all cost money every year, and the money for your marker arrived exactly once.

So the question is not whether we can promise eternity. It is what we do to make the page last as long as possible, and what happens to it if we eventually cannot keep going.

What we commit to

Ten dollars of every marker, set aside

$10 from each marker sold goes into a permanence reserve, held separately from the money that runs the business day to day. It exists for one purpose: to keep these pages online and the domain renewed, even in a year when nobody buys anything at all.

We publish the figure rather than saying “a portion” because a number is something you can hold us to. Serving a page that does not change costs a fraction of a cent a year; ten dollars, banked once, covers a very long time.

Your own copy, every year

Once a year we email you a complete archive of your memorial — the full text, every photograph at original size, and a plain HTML copy of the page that opens in any browser without us. You can download it at any time from your account as well.

This is the part that matters most, and it is the part almost nobody offers. If everything else fails, the memorial still exists, on your own drive, in a format that will still open in thirty years.

The address never moves

Your memorial’s web address is assigned when you buy and is fixed for the life of the page. We do not reuse a retired address, ever — not for anybody else’s family, under any circumstance. A code on a stone will never lead to a stranger.

If we have to stop

If RestMarker ever winds down, we commit to, in this order:

• Telling every account holder in writing, well in advance.
• Sending everyone a final full archive of their memorial.
• Attempting to hand the domain and the archive to another memorial organisation or a genealogical society willing to keep the addresses resolving.
• Failing that, spending the remaining reserve on keeping the domain and a static copy of every published page online for as long as the money lasts — a static page costs very little to serve.

Who can look after this after you

The other half of permanence is not technical. The person who buys a marker for their parents is often in their sixties, and when they die the login dies with them — which matters enormously for a stone shared by a couple, where the second name may be added years later.

So your account has a successor contact: a second person you name who can ask us for access. Nothing happens automatically and we verify before handing anything over, but it means there is a name on file instead of a dead end.

It takes a minute and it is the single most useful thing you can do for this memorial after you have written it.