Unreachable Addresses on the Net???

Factual Questions
1
      • Sometimes I find a net address printed in a magazine (usually British magazines) but when I try to visit it, the message “not found on this server” comes back. The magazines often aren’t more than three months old, and yet most of the addresses don’t work; I doubt that many sites live such short lives. Is there any other way to get to these sites? A latest example is
        cistudio.lacerta.ru
        -very possibly a porn site; I don’t know. I guess it can’t really be considered a link if it don’t work. I found pictures of (clothed) contortionist women somewhere, and this address was placed in the photos. Are servers in Europe operated differently than in the US? Is there some way to connect to a European server and have it check? - MC
2

One possibility is that it is an amateur site, and is not on-line all the time, being mainly used for other things.

Another is that it was a site signed up for and abandoned or relocated before the magazine came out.

A third is that it simply ran out of money or changed format. There’s been a big shakeout of dot.coms lately, and I suspect firms in the Silicon Glens and Silicon Hamlets are hurting even more than those here in Silicon Valley.

New rule, the opposite of that baseball movie slogan, “If they don’t come, you can’t build it.”

3

I’m sure there’s no real difference between US and European servers (it’s the same hardware, for a start). It may well be – especially true for porn sites – that it’s no longer there. A lot of porn sites are hosted on free web-space providers, and they seem to come down fairly hard on sites using copyrighted or “obscene” (by their own definition) material. I’m sure there’s more than a few non-porn sites suffering from this; ISPs and web-space providers in th UK are getting increasingly jittery about hosting anything that opens them up to the slightest possibility of legal action.

4

Another possibility is that you’re behind a firewall or proxy server that either doesn’t recognize international addresses, or chooses to specifically ignore .ru (where is that, anyway?). Some foreign domains, especially for small, poorly-developed countries, specialize in material which would be frowned upon in the United States, and an ISP might find it convenient to just block all of them from that domain.

5

Russia. A list of country codes can be found here.

6

Or try register.com input the URL & see if anyone owns it. It’ll do international codes. Also, do WHOIS (discussed on the board before lots) to find out who owns it that way you know its on the web.