ancient cycling-related website - how does it stay up?

[eddief]

I believe this company used to operate out of Santa Rosa, CA. They have not been in business for many years. Just curious how a website like this stays up and running for years after the business is closed.

http://www.bikepro.com/

[Ken Robb]

I guess it's better to wonder "how does it stay up? than "why doesn't it stay up? :rolleyes:

[eddief]

Ken you da man.

[Kevan]

kickstand.

[Jeff Weir]

In it's time, the Bikepro catlaog was a GREAT source of information. It was a tremendous resource for us (at the time) mtb gear-hounds.

I loaned my copy of the catalog out to a friend, never got it back, and to this day have a contract out on him. The guy behind Bikepro, Frank Walburg is no longer involved....closed up the store....he was the person behind all of the copy.

[Ginger]

I came across that site when I was looking for some obscure piece of cycling stuff...got all excited, then figured out that the site wasn't active. DOH!

[DavidK]

Just curious how a website like this stays up and running for years after the business is closed.

Easy.

I have a web server and host for some friends, it's a small thing, I only host about 20 sites on top of the one major one I run.

Several of these accounts go back for 3 or 4 years. Every now and then one of the projects my friends run will dry up. But they might not tell me, or they might tell me and I don't act it on it straight away. Whatever happens, I don't generally hit delete straight away... delete really means delete (none of that Recycle Bin stuff), and you'd be surprised how often people don't honestly mean delete.

So the site lingers in the background, and some part of my brain registers that in the future I should take care of it.

Except it doesn't happen. Years can pass, and accounts just live on. And why bother dealing with them? Disk space is so cheap as to not be a cost, so is bandwidth, and so is everything else on the server... once you own the server.

And there's always a little bit of fear pressing delete... everything on the server is fine, will hitting delete screw something up for someone else? Is there a dependency between things on the server? What happens if the script that deletes the site doesn't cleanly remove the info from the web server configuration file?

All things added up... the cost to keep it in existence is zero, and the risk and cost of hitting delete is above zero.

So time passes, and eventually domain names expire, servers die and only the important stuff is restored, etc.

But it can take years and years and years for it to run it's course.

Of course, the professional thing to do when you shut your business is to take down the site yourself, but it's the last thing on your mind when your business has failed and you're fighting to salvage a life out of it all.

[Kines]

Awesome! Thanks for the link - I just placed an order!

[Too Tall]

Ask Sandy.

CustName: MELINDA MERMAN
server: ns1.webicommerce.com
email: postmaster@bikepro.com
Server: 66.98.244.52
Responsible Person: none
bikepro.com 1 MX preference: 10
exchange: danny.webicommerce.com
Address: 442 Steele Ln
City: Santa Rosa
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 95403
Country: US
RegDate: 2001-10-25
Updated: 2001-10-25