We still don't have proper digital preservation mechanisms. If you are an executor of an estate, and you have a website and a twitter account, what you do with them? You are surely not interested in running them by yourself. You can't just leave them alone - website support costs money, and also if left alone, it will inevitably be broken into and cause all kinds of trouble. You can't just sell it to somebody (at least not to somebody you'd want to sell) or donate it. There's no organizations dedicated to preserving such properties, as far as I know. So, what do you do? You shut them down, you have not other alternative.
If it's something like a blog archive.org works. And if it's a website people care about it's as simple as giving the archiver/internet historian/data hoarder hobbyist niche to back it all up on ipfs.
If they wrote things you can digitize them and turn them into an epub that might last a few hundred years. And you can absolutely donate a website, that's just a matter of picking the right license and hosting the actual data somewhere, not the actual website.
An one-time snapshot is not the active site under the original domain. You can do a snapshot (even though there's no organized procedure even for that, afaik) but that's not the same as keeping the site running in perpetuity.
And unfortunately archive.org is woefully underfunded. We take it for granted and it could be gone someday. Please support it if you have the means to do so.
Exactly. Unless you've setup a sufficient endowment and a legal entity of some sort, it's not reasonable to expect a relative to keep your passion project going. And even if they do for sentimental reasons for a while, that's just kicking the can a bit down the road.
