Even if the software it was running on never had a bug finding, the hardware would eventually fail and it'd have to be updated to run on modern software. Coupled with the fact that bugs do pop up in operating systems, web servers, etc, it is no free to maintain. The Internet Archive screen scrapes everything and just saves the pages you see, but even that isn't free or trivial if you don't already have the software.

> The Internet Archive screen scrapes everything and just saves the pages you see, but even that isn't free or trivial

That’s what I’m suggesting: you run a big screen scrape job, disable the search and any other forms (review entry or comments) and host that. At the end of the day, you have an unchanged archive running on your existing www server.

At least that’s how I’ve kept up old stuff that isn’t popular anymore but still pulls in enough visitors and ads to cover costs.

Depending on the underlying infrastructure.

Unless you freeze the infrastructure too, this is incorrect.

Updates are going to be a requirement if you care at all about security.

New vulnerabilities are being found in the most popular web servers on a regular basis.