Websites aren’t forever—some thrive, others vanish into the digital void. Like any app, a website can cease to exist if its host decides to pull the plug.
According to NetCraft, there are currently around 1.1 billion websites on the internet. However, there could be more. Out of these, only about 200 million are active and maintained.
In the past, websites were mainly static files that were just served by a web server. These days, however, a lot of websites have a ton of dynamic features and are more like apps running on a computer than static pages. This “computer” is a web server which handles requests from devices worldwide, and your device displays them using HTML.
How Websites Work
When you visit a website (by typing “www” or the domain directly), your device sends a message to the web server (called an HTTP request) asking for resources. The server responds with a blueprint (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) of how the site should look at that exact moment. Your browser then processes and renders this blueprint, creating what you see on screen.
For this process to be successful, two key elements must remain in place: a functioning web server hosting the site and a DNS entry that associates the website’s name with its IP address. Lose one or both, and the website may become unreachable.
Websites vanish for many reasons. The server hosting it might be shut down due to cost or disinterest. Or the owner might stop paying for the domain name registration, breaking the link between the domain and its IP address. Without DNS, the site’s user-friendly name no longer connects to the digital space where it resides, rendering it effectively inaccessible unless you know the direct IP (but this does not always guarantee access to a website).
Can a Website Just Disappear?
Yes, and they often do. If the server goes offline or the DNS entry expires, the website ceases to be publicly accessible since it leaves nothing for devices to connect to. Even if a website’s files remain intact on some forgotten machine, without a DNS entry or proper maintenance, it’s functionally extinct.
A website might not be available to the public anymore, but its files and features can still exist privately or offline.
Looking At Old Websites on the Wayback Machine
Thankfully, not all websites are lost forever. The Wayback Machine, a project by the Internet Archive, preserves snapshots of websites over time. It is sort of like a website archaeologist, crawling URLs, requesting their content, and storing these “captures” of their webpages to archive.
You can see how a website once looked, but interactive features and dynamic content are absent, and not all URLs make it into its archives. Additionally, the Wayback Machine has other limitations when it comes to capturing websites over time. It doesn’t log into accounts, so it can’t archive gated content. Nor does it perform searches or generate dynamic outputs.
What About Website Errors Like 404?
If you come across a 404 error, it means that the server could not find the page that was requested. This might mean the site is gone, or that the specific page has been moved or deleted. Similar errors, like 403 (forbidden) or 500 (server error), provide clues about a website’s status but don’t necessarily indicate that it’s permanently gone.
The First Website in the World
Did you know that the world’s first website, created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991, still exists? It’s a simple text page hosted at CERN, providing an introduction to the World Wide Web and links to early web technologies:
You can see what it looked like 33 years ago and take a glimpse at the humble beginnings of the internet. This website still exists because CERN maintains its hosting and DNS records, and without maintenance, we wouldn’t be able to access it today.
The internet is constantly evolving and websites come and go, but not without a trace. Luckily, tools like the Wayback Machine keep a record, and websites need maintenance too, to stay accessible.
