Thinking long-term, what happens when you downgrade from premium (and life)

  • Unknown's avatar
    designbymichael · Member ·

    I’ve got a question — thinking about the long-game and what will happen to my blog long after I’ve passed on (and perhaps more specifically about the images on it) If I had upped my subscription and had an image library for my blog that exceeded the limits of the free plan, and the inevitability of death set in and my blog subscription terminated, what exactly would happen from an image library perspective? Would all my images remain and my blog unaffected from being reduced back to the free level? In other words, would the storage limitation really only kick in for adding new images to the image library, or would WordPress attempt to throttle my blog back to the 3 GB limit?

    I’m just curious about what actually would happen, thinking about what would happen when life expires for me and what would happen to the images and content when my subscription is no longer renewed and the site goes back to a free level.

    Thanks for humoring me :)

  • Unknown's avatar
    charleybea · Member ·

    Hello @designbymichael,

    Interesting question, but I’ll be happy to humor you. :)

    Your images would remain in place and accessible but you’d be required to upgrade again in order to add new images. Hard to do if you’re not around right?

    See “What happens to my files if I cancel my plan?” on this page: https://en.support.wordpress.com/space-upgrade/

    Thanks for the chuckle!

  • Unknown's avatar
    designbymichael · Member ·

    @charleybea I’m totally amused that you thought it was all just for fun and laughs :) but it’s actually a part of a broader philosophical and practical contemplation of the digital assets we create and their longevity (or lackthereof) when we die. When I think about the legacy my parents will leave behind — now in their 70s — they’ll leave behind physical photographs taken with their film cameras, maybe handwritten letters they received from friends or loved ones, maybe even handwritten journals about their experiences in life. But you and I live in a dominantly digital world — we take photos with our phones that end up in the cloud, we blog on WordPress, maybe journal on a cloud-hosted/synced journaling app like Day One, or create all sorts of digitally-based things — what is to become of the digital legacy that we leave behind for our children or those that we leave behind?

    So really, my question while deeply seated with philosophical motivations (and a little humor thrown in for fun), is very much a practical one about how the publicly hosted/presented thoughts and reflections will live on, and whether or not all the images associated with those posts would remain intact or be throttled back. But I’m glad you had a good chuckle though. :) It’s a delight to make others smile!

  • Unknown's avatar
    eozolins87 · Member ·

    I suppose this is a good case for having physical backups of everything that is kept online and in the cloud… then your digital legacy would be tangible on a hard drive, and not subject to the pricing whims of whichever service. Your children could go to a technology museum to find a device that can read a hard drive from 2018, ha.

    It’s a good question though. Would a site like WordPress have to start archiving or deleting posts that are more than x years old? I wonder if some kind of expected time limit will come into play as we hit the 25th, 30th, 50th year of YouTube, WP etc.

    Will libraries care to archive the blogs of people in the 2010s the way a journal from the Revolutionary War is kept? How will they decide which thoughts are of value to history?

    I haven’t had enough coffee for this yet…

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