The web is littered with broken links, broken dreams, and dead domains — a swath of digital ghosts, businesses, and portfolios that once thrived.

Every year, countless site owners wake to the stark realization that a missed renewal or registrar hiccup has wiped their online presence from existence. From academic citations that no longer resolve, to brands losing customer trust when their URLs disappear overnight, today’s domain model is a fragile standard run by a few centralized organizations.

AR.IO has built ArNS - a permanent domain name system - not only to put an end to this cycle, but to expand the possibilities of online identity and its use cases.

Instead of renting a domain name and having to remember to renew it regularly or else lose your data, ArNS lets you claim a permanent digital identity on Arweave’s blockchain with a single transaction. No more recurring fees, no more central authorities with the power to censor or seize content; just guaranteed, tamper-proof hosting that lasts as long as the network itself.

This is a new era, where ‘pay once, store forever’ is the standard. Powered by AR.IO‘s permanent cloud network, the Arweave Name System (ArNS) ensures that your website, brand, and data remain globally accessible, immutable, and censorship-resistant.

Welcome to the age where you will never lose a website again.

Kill Domain Renewals for Good

For decades, websites have lived on precarious rental rails that start with registering with a corporate registrar, but end with sweating a renewal invoice every month. Miss one payment and the domain vanishes.

As registrars consolidate, rules shift, and subscription fees climb, countless websites flicker out of existence or are seized, leaving only dead links in their wake. This growing plague of link rot not only undermines individual projects, but it also damages access to millions of pieces of content and erodes trust in the internet itself.

Centralized registrars, site hosting companies, and cloud storage platforms wield ultimate control, unilaterally changing pricing, imposing new terms of service, or even taking down content at the whim of governments or private interests. As a result, every site owner lives with a silent ticking clock that renders their content dependent on a vulnerable rental framework that offers neither true ownership nor permanence.

ArNS breaks this dependence cycle on corporate registrars and recurring payments by directly addressing the root causes of link rot and site loss. Rather than rent your domain and thus your digital identity, ArNS allows you to claim a permanent one with a single payment.

One Payment, Infinite Hosting

At the heart of ArNS lies an economic model that ushers in the next — and last — solution for domain and data storage anyone will ever need: “Pay once, store forever.”  You have the option to lease a name for one to five years, or pay a slightly higher one-time fee to own it permanently.

If you choose the permanent option, after checkout, there’s no invoice, no expiration date, and no risk of deletion; just assurance that what you build will be preserved permanently with no ongoing costs.

Rather than chasing churn, AR.IO reinvests in the infrastructure that preserves your content forever — an internet that remembers everything without the capacity to be deleted or forgotten.

Since both your ArNS name and your site’s files live on Arweave’s permaweb, storage costs are covered once and never again while content gets distributed across a decentralized ledger backed by economic incentives. This guarantees active availability without further payments, whether you’re a solo creator, a decentralized organization, or a global enterprise; ArNS ensures you truly own your digital presence.

Domains That Think and Evolve

ArNS is a programmable on-chain asset that, once published, becomes immutable, tied to a historic version that lives on forever. Still, it’s possible to publish new versions and link them back to previous states to enable transparent version updates for users and visitors. This smart record evolution is impossible in a generic Domain Name System (DNS), where each change overwrites the last with no provenance.

Beyond versioning, ArNS names can trigger powerful integrations, features, and automations. This includes allowing developers to write smart contracts that respond to a name’s resolution, automate workflows when records update, or fire oracles to fetch off-chain data.

For example, a decentralized finance (DeFi) interface under an ArNS name could automatically update liquidity parameters when a specific record is modified. This introduces dynamic, on-chain interactions that exceed simple domain resolution.

Integration with AR.IO’s developer stack is user-friendly; just point your ArNS record to a static site on Arweave or a bespoke decentralized application (dApp), then serve content programmatically through AR.IO’s gateway network.

Built with familiar frameworks, like React, Next.js, and static site generators, having a permaweb backend as the foundation makes your project uncensorable, unruggable, and permanently accessible — without sacrificing modern developer ergonomics.

Crypto-Free Checkout with Global Reach

One barrier to Web3 adoption has been payment friction.

Crypto wallets, token conversions, and gas fees deter mainstream users. In May, AR.IO solved this by launching credit card payments for ArNS domain minting and hosting.

Regardless of crypto experience, anyone can purchase a permanent domain and deploy a website in minutes via a familiar checkout flow. This milestone bridges the convenience of Web2 with the permanence of Web3, all while expanding ArNS’s reach to institutions, businesses, and creators worldwide.

The AR.IO gateway network — a decentralized mesh of hundreds of incentivized nodes — indexes, caches, and serves content globally, underpinning every permanent ArNS site.

This distributed architecture ensures smooth, fast, and reliable delivery, even during traffic spikes or regional outages. Because your data lives on Arweave’s permaweb, any compatible gateway can fetch and display your site, providing truly censorship-resistant and tamper-proof hosting.

Say goodbye to expired domains, broken links, and linkrot. Say hello to a web presence that is finally permanent, accessible, secure, and firmly in your hands — preserved forever.
If you have a project that aligns with AR.IO’s mission of getting permanent data storage into the hands of everyone, join us in building the decentralized web and apply for an AR.IO grant today:https://ar.io/grants

Phil Mataras, founder and CEO of permanent storage network AR.IO