We will recover 1 site for 2 organizations/individuals during February 2025.

Selection criteria include technical feasibility of the restoration and your consent to share the story as a case study afterward.

Due to the tight timeline of this project, you’ll also need to agree to a response time of around 48 hours — so we can move forward together!

What is a site recovered and preserved on the dWeb?

We consider a website to be down when it is no longer accessible through its address, or it has not been properly maintained and has been infected, censored, or blocked by the provider, it was taken down by the provider for lack of payment, the provider does not exist anymore… there are many reasons why we can lose our website.

When we recover and preserve a site, we:

• Use a backup copy or free public archiving service such as the Wayback Machine to generate a new version of the site, called a static site.

• We test the new static site so that it behaves like the lost one.

• We host copies of the new site on servers at Sutty and Distributed Press

• The site will be accessible via its historical address, for example https://lostwebsite.org and distributed addresses such as ipns://lostwebsite.org and hyper://lostwebsite.org.

What we will not be able to do is:

• We can’t recover the site or some of its pages if there are no full backup copies or if it was developed with Flash or other closed technologies. We can only recover sites developed with open technologies such as HTML and CSS (fortunately these are the majority of sites!).

• We can’t provide access to the original content manager. The recovered site will be static, i.e. functional for visitors, but not updatable. We can quote separately for the conversion to the Sutty content manager so that it can be updated.

• We can’t make changes and optimizations in the design or content of the site. We can quote this separately.

• We can’t recover the address (the “domain name”) if access was lost and cannot be recovered. We can offer technical advice, but recovery is at the organization’s expense.

  If this is not possible, the recovered website could use a name in the style of recoveredsite.sutty.nl.

• We can’t bear the cost of recovery and annual renewal of the domain name. We can make technical recommendations.

Conditions that make it difficult or impossible to recover a site

No backup copies

If the site does not have backup copies or was not archived by Internet archiving projects such as the Wayback Machine, it is impossible to recover it.

Your content was private

If the site content (or part of it) was only accessible with a user account and password and there are no backups, it cannot be recovered, because it could not be publicly archived.

No access to the domain name

If the domain name was registered by a person outside the organization, the only way to recover it is by transferring it to a current account of the organization.

If we do not have access to the domain name, the site may be recovered, but it will have to be hosted under another domain name.

Keeping domain names is important because search engines and site visitors remember that address and there is no technical way to report the change. Our general recommendation is that once a domain name is registered, always keep it in the organization’s name and organization and renew it even if it is no longer in use.

The domain name was taken by a domain landowner (domain “squatter”)

If we enter the site and find an advertisement saying that it can be bought again, it is very possible that the domain is registered by a domain landowner.

In that case, they will want to charge much more than the normal registration fee, based on the perceived value of the domain name, although it is always possible to negotiate a lower price.