There are many reasons why a site may suddenly change. Let’s look at why sites disappear and some ways to track down more information.
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Why sites vanish
The most obvious one to me is simply that the blog is gone. It simply doesn’t exist anymore. Now, the site could have been:
- Removed
- Sold
- Re-purposed
- Hacked and taken down
There are many, many different things that could go on here.
Based on the information that you found and the information that I did, there’s actually no way to tell for certain exactly what happened. There’s no published way to contact the owner of that site.
Looking for contact information
You may want to try using a Whois service (it sounds like you may have already done this).
From time to time, I use whois.domaintools.com to look up who actually owns a domain. On a site like this, you can sometimes view contact information, such as an email address.
The problem is the email address is public, so it probably gets a lot of spam. The website owner may not be paying attention to it. They are supposed to, but sometimes it’s simply easier not to watch it.
I took a quick look at the WhoIs information for the domain that you’ve mentioned and in this specific case the domain appears to be owned by a company in China. You can try emailing them.
If you can’t find an email address, another idea is to try emailing standard email addresses like “info @ the domain.com,” “support @ the domain.com,” or “webmaster @ the domain.com.”
While those are standard and sometimes even required, they are frequently not implemented because of all of the spam that gets sent to them. While you can email some of these standard addresses against that domain, I’m not hopeful that you’re going to hear anything.
Is it really gone?
Are you certain that you’re spelling the domain correctly? I don’t know if you’re going there from a bookmark that you saved that used to work or if you’re just used to typing in the domain yourself. My recommendation is that you triple-check to make sure that the name you’re typing in is the domain that you think you’ve been going to for all this time.
If it is, then I really don’t have any good suggestions. Sometimes, sites go away. Disappearing one day is simply a fact of life on the internet.
Not knowing anything about the website in question you could always try the Internet Archive. They may or may not have a copy depending on several factors such as the age of the site, if access has been restricted via a robots.txt file etc.
http://archive.org/