How can I recognise services that intend to live forever? Meetup used to have reports and mailing lists but it went to a sinking company and is now a pointless SPA which doesnt let Firefox log in. I know a group that acquired several competing products, and they missed a crucial innovation which the indies had for a while.
For organisations, the best you might be able to do is some kind of co-operative: it's much less likely to sell out (although not impossible), you generally get a vote in how it's run, and since they're forced to be self-funding you're not dependent on VC funding whims. With sufficient runway transparency you can always know how far they are away from shutdown and how much funding they need.
Twenty years ago (!) I helped set up a hosting co-op for university societies: https://www.srcf.net/
One of our specific aims was preserving continuity. Most societies are run by undergraduates who do it for a year or two and leave after 3 years, so making it as easy as possible to handle handover was a key feature. It's done pretty well for something that pre-dates Facebook, Github, Myspace, and even Yahoo Groups itself.
Oh, it's been years since I was involved with any of the actual running of it. I don't even have a shell account any more. In the early days it was "the server", a spare PC that was donated. These days it looks like they have a donated cluster: https://www.srcf.net/faq/about#system
The "backend" will be Apache. On day 1 we used SSI (server-side includes) for "theming" pages, which were all in handwritten HTML. I suspect it's still like that given the five blank lines before DOCTYPE. It looks like some bootstrap CSS has been sprinkled on it since then. There's no front-end Javascript because there doesn't need to be.
> Until 2006 we had just one server in use, kern (a dual Athlon 1.6GHz PC with 2GB of RAM and 400GB of disk). Before that we used to run on an ancient Intel Pentium running at 166MHz with 128MB of RAM. How times have changed :)
Indeed. That ancient system was perfectly adequate for serving web pages to a few thousand people for light use. At the time I was carrying around the amazing new thing that was a computer you could fit in your pocket and play music illegally downloaded from the internet on. It was a Toshiba Libretto 30 with 8MB (eight megabytes) of RAM and a PCMCIA sound card.
Our systems approach to the SRCF was very much "what is the simplest thing that could possibly work". Apache+CGI+PHP with UNIX user accounts will get you a long way if you let it.
The real achievement is political and personal. I'm amazed that they've always managed to find good enough volunteer staff for the whole thing for twenty years.
