Reviving a Dead Website

  • Thread starter Ether
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First time posting the Computers & Tech threads! I've got a few questions for anyone who knows how domains / web hosting works in much more detail than myself.

So without going into a lot of detail, I was given a domain and asked to point it at a new website on a new platform for my brother's business. Apparently because I have my own websites he thought I was a tech guru and could do this for him. Although I knew enough about how pointing domains in GoDaddy (the host) worked to know how to do this so I had no issue helping him out.

So long story short, I got the domains pointed at his new website, and all is good. However, he then realized he wanted to retrieve info from his old site, which of course google can't access because the links are all broken now. And the Wayback machine can only go so far.

So, does anyone know if it's possible to point a dummy domain back at his old site as a way to bring it back temporarily? The site data still exists on Joomla (I think). But I have no understanding of that system.

Apologies if I'm being too vague in describing the situation.
 
Yes if you know the IP of the server with the old website on it (before the domain was pointed elsewhere/ to another server/ IP) you can edit your Windows host file on the pc you are using to resolve the domain when entered to point to the old website.

Google edit host file for website IP

once this is done when you enter the domain on your pc you will then see the old website again.
 
Another option is to simply add a DNS record to the domain and point it to the old IP address of the server which used to host the site. For example, you might want to create an A record of old.example.com. Then you can access the old and new site simultaneously.

Just be sure to delete that DNS record when you're done so Google doesn't accidentally index both sites, as that could cause some SEO issues (although the old site should go offline once you terminate its web hosting).
 
Oh wow, certainly wasn't expecting a response from the man himself! Been browsing GTP since '07, only recently created an account. Thanks for your input Jordan, much appreciated 👍 I'll give this a shot as well.
 
Just be sure to delete that DNS record when you're done so Google doesn't accidentally index both sites, as that could cause some SEO issues (although the old site should go offline once you terminate its web hosting).

Once you've created the DNS entry to old.example.com, go to the root directory of the website on the old server. Create a file called robots.txt.

In that file, put the following:
Code:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This will prevent your site from being indexed by crawlers.
 
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