What's up with http://www.dnn4free.com?

February 21, 2008 9:45 PM

Does anyone know what's up with http://www.dnn4free.com? (Or how to get back the data for son's History Day project???)

DS is working on a project (web site) for National History Day. They created and stored their site at http://www.dnn4free.com so everyone in the group could work on it at their convenience. However, they didn't make a backup - they were getting ready to burn it onto a CD to turn in for the competition (Due Monday!) and now dnn4free has been offline since this afternoon. Besides chalking this up to experience - save or perish - any ideas of what to do if it doesn't come back willingly?

posted by caroljean63 to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Look through your browser's cache and try archive.org.
posted by 6550 at 10:16 PM on February 21, 2008

I don't know that you can do much of anything, but I was looking into the site in question.

Here is some Whois info.

It shows Tony Valenti as the site owner.

Now a Reverse-IP says there are 19 domains sharing the IP. We can see three of them:

# Appleberryquilts.com - Belongs to Tony Valenti and is DOWN
# Bonnieplants.com - Does NOT belong to Tony Valenti and is UP
# Buydnnstuff.com - Belongs to Tony Valenti and is DOWN

You can try emailing the contact email, [e-mail], but I am not sure how much good that will do.

Being that the name Tony Valenti is not very common, I decided to do a search.

First result is www.emergencystick.com - Belongs to Tony Valenti and is DOWN

Fifth result is www.keepaliveforever.com - Belongs to Tony Valenti and is DOWN

I am sure we could keep finding the other 81 domains he owns, and we would find them down too. Sounds like a hosting issue. Maybe billing, but that is just a guess. Hope the site comes up soon. You could try your cache as mentioned above, but archive.org probably won't be of too much assistance as I imagine there was an authentication system in place.

Good Luck!
posted by B(oYo)BIES at 10:36 PM on February 21, 2008

Archive.org won't be much help on this, as pages don't typically show up in its index for about six months. Perhaps a Google cache would be more likely? You can search for the cached version by typing cache:BLANK into Google, with the site's URL in place of the word "BLANK".
posted by Rhaomi at 10:43 PM on February 21, 2008

yeah, he already sent a (probably desperate-sounding) e-mail to Tony - no reply. My son found dnn4free while prowling around the dotnetnuke sites. He found Tony here http://www.dotnetnukepodcast.com/tabid/36/view/detail/ItemId/3/topic/PowerDNN%20Hosting,%20Interview%20at%20OpenForce%2007/default.aspx

He pointed this out to me when I told him that "Tony" was probably some guy sitting in his underwear in his basement with 100 cats.
posted by caroljean63 at 11:17 PM on February 21, 2008

If you can figure out who *his* host was, you could try sending them an email. (I successfully retrieved files that way once when my (reseller) host stopped paying the bills & my site went down.)

Who Is Hosting This.com says that bonnieplants.com (listed above as being on the same IP & still online) is hosted by Mobile Now. Clicking on their link for Mobile Now takes you to CeraNet, who I'd guess is the true host.
posted by belladonna at 5:47 AM on February 22, 2008