I don't usually weigh in on how other sites handle their stuff... Gay Authors is run and controlled by an LLC and when you set up an LLC you have to define what happens when the people involved change or go away. This has occurred several times over the years here as we've lost various people for various reasons. It's been pretty transparent for you as members. I'd imagine it'll be rougher when my time comes, but, I did set things up to continue.
Gay Authors is backed up in full on our server, on the datacenters backup and on an external backup site. On top of all that, I periodically download my own copy of everything. There are instructions in place to ensure that's recoverable by our companies successor if that should become necessary.
The Internet Wayback Machine, archive.org: https://web.archive.org/ has backups of a lot of sites. In fact, if the site is still up now, you can manually request they archive certain pages... like those stories you are concerned about. This stores it "forever".
Gay Authors from March 2004:
Let's see... Gay Authors does have the ability to display the entire story at once, at least for members. Just click the printer icon on the Table of Contents page. All relevant information is there along with all the chapters.
As for other sites disappearing, if other website owners wish to reach out, Gay Authors is already paying for our own dedicated server... other than Nifty, we can simply add dozens of other sites with little to no impact or cost to us beyond the regular domain registration fees, and additional backup costs. I've offered in the past to a couple of other sites and got a no thank you. So, I don't bother to ask any more. 20 years ago, I decided if Gay Authors was going to stay a thing, I wasn't going to be in the month-to-month panic of do we have enough to stay open asking for donations and living with that stress. So I went a different path and made Gay Authors self-supporting. So long as our premium members and our ad revenue stay above a certain level, all the payments are handled by automatic transfers. This decision allowed us to grow to where are on a pretty solid dedicated server that is rated for hosting hundreds of sites. Or Gay Authors and snappy as it does. The way others run their sites, they have a much smaller footprint in the database (the reactions, comments, notifications, etc all have a pretty heavy load, believe it not).
If anyone knows of a site disappearing and the owner is interested in keeping it around or moving the stories into our archive to keep them available to people, we are open to discussing it. (we are in the position to keep things running, not in the position of buying anything)
