Accessing Sites that are Down

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How in the Tech

Accessing Sites that are Down

By Adam Myers ⋅ April 17, 2008 ⋅

Tags: coral cache, google, wayback machine

Its happened to most everyone at one point or another, a friend sends you a link to check out or a Google Search returns a perfect result, but upon clicking the link you find that the page cannot be loaded. It happens. The servers or networks that host the site are clogged, the page could actually have been deleted, or the server in question has just faded away into the abyss. What are you options at this point, if the are even any? Well, as with most things, it depends!

Sometimes sites can suffer from their own popularity. A new article can garner attention of eyeballs around the world, eventually ending up on any one of the then popular social network sites. Soon, the server is overwhelmed with requests and things grind to a halt – this is commonly referred to the Slashdot or lately, the Digg effect. So powerful is this phenomenon that their exists a free service to combat the issue, Coral Cache.

Coral Cache is a free service using the distributed computing model to overcome the “Slashdot effect.” By appending .nyud.net to the end of the URL will cause your browser to load the page through Coral Cache’s vast army of servers, rather than a direct connection to the original overloaded server.

Example: To access http://www.howinthetech.com/ through Coral Cache modify the URL address to read http://www.howinthetech.com.nyud.net/

Typically you will find that users of the various social networks will trigger the “cache” by visiting the original URL in question before the site is overwhelmed with traffic and requests. Generally, links to the Coral Cache version of the site can be found in the comments section of linking site.

This is great, but what if the content has been removed? When in doubt we turn to Google and their Google Cache feature. As Google’s search bots scour the Internet it caches the sites and pages it visits. The easiest way to access the Google Cache version of a site is to search directly for the original page (in Google!). If it’s in the cache you’ll see a link leading to the index version of the page.

Fantastic, but then what if Google doesn’t have a recent snapshot or worse, no snapshot at all? One of the greatest websites that few people know of is the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine. The nonprofit was founded with the intent of building an Internet library offering permanent access to sites and pages – mainly for scholars and researchers. You can think of it like Google and it’s caching system but the index pages aren’t stored with just the latest version of the site, but rather every iteration seen. Their goal being to index and store every website created. Through the magic of the Wayback Machine you can often find pages that have been removed or deleted from the Internet years ago. Having second thoughts about that website you did in highschool detailing your teenage angst yet?

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