Help is Needed! Abandoned Website Dying Torn Apart by Marketing Vultures

Max Shestov — Thu, 08 Apr 2021 16:21:45 +0000

A Genuine Wish to Revive Abandoned Website: My Passion Project

This is going way off the topic of dev.to but I would like to share with you a story of how I came across a very nice designed website that became an orphan and continues to surf the internet alone.The homepage of INNERDESIGN.COM looked absolutely stunning in 2011

The website was created as a community for design experts and passionate from all over the world with the main focus on Interior Design.

I started to walk through the elegant website and had the sudden realization that the website looked like it had been tossed.
And sure enough, I found out that after 2014, they were not posting anything on the website nor were they active on the various social media channels: Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest which they had set up to connect with their customers and fans.
So I found that the site innerdesign.com was created in 2011, on the cutting edge of technology during that period of time, and it still looks great!

What might be the reason for abandoning such a beautiful website?

Being a web designer myself, I understand how much planning and effort might have been put into this one to create with lesser-known resources and knowledge.

The possibility is that some unfortunate event occurred to the owners of INNER DESIGN all of a sudden? The reason must be something catastrophic. Something this good could not have been abandoned without a very serious reason.

Perhaps the owners of INNER DESIGN do not exist anymore.

The next thing I thought about was that we as a web community should try to revamp this website which has high Google rankings [ Alexa ranking is 89,315 ].
I, along with my team, decided to contact them, but that step, as expected, turned out to be not so easy. The site administrators are not answering calls, and emails sent to reach out and connect are returned with error messages.
The “Creative Web” agency from Milan which created this website has a broken contact form. Our attempt to contact them by commenting under one of the blog’s posts has gone unanswered.
Twitter and Facebook pages of INNER DESIGN
The website probably has Italian roots. The domain name and hosting service are probably in auto-renewal mode. The Facebook page has three administrators from Italy but sadly, it doesn’t reveal their profiles.

Innerdesign.com was built on WordPress CMS and seems to be perfect even by today’s standards, but the bad part is this abandoned site has become the dumping ground for all sorts of malicious activities. You also might notice that the speed of the page’s loading is very slow.
Users are not paying attention to its design and functional aspects but feeding on it like vultures to pick up the design nuances and content and embed their codes and links to establish their websites.

It is pathetic and pitiful!

The website has become an ignored and abandoned site and the dumping ground for a lot of malicious activities. People from all over the globe are using the site to communicate using the platform as a vehicle for spam comments trying to fetch backlinks to their websites.
INNER DESIGN website being used as a vehicle for some strange conversations
Because of the high authority of the website, spammers use this backlink on their own websites for their own promotion.

I genuinely would like to help the site owners (if they exist) clean, revamp, and refurbish the site and make it look new with some tweaks here and there. It will do wonders.
My humble request to the entire web community: Let’s find out the way to make innerdesign.com up and running again, or at least to figure out what happened.

Let us save this web orphan from surfing on the internet alone. If we do not care now, then ultimately it will fall into bad hackers’ hands or ultimately die a tragic death. If the article can make an impact or if it reaches the site owner someday, we can hope. Or if some of you can reach out to them, please do so!

You can read the full story of how I accidentally came across the website here.

Install Apache Server and PHP on Google Cloud Platform.

Max Shestov — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 21:32:41 +0000

This guide shows you how to set up Apache and PHP on a Compute Engine virtual machine instance on GCP. The instructions are for Ubuntu 20.04 Linux distribution (goes with PHP 7.4 in its default repositories).

Creating a virtual machine instance

Go to your Google Cloud Console and click
Compute Engine > VM Instances > Create
Create a name for your instance
Region — us-central1(Iowa)
Zone — us-central1-c

[Update] Google introduced E2-micro Free Tier, which is a part of a second-generation VM family on August 1, 2021
Series - E2
Machine type - e2-micro (2 vCPU, 1 GB memory)

Boot disc - Standard persistent disk, Image Ubuntu, 20.04 LTS (LTS — Long Term Support)

Firewall - checkmark
Allow HTTP traffic
Allow HTTPS traffic

Click Create.
It takes a few seconds to create the instance.

Installing Apache and PHP on the instance

On your instance click SSH to open the SSH window
In the opened window update packages that need upgrading typing

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt upgrade -y && sudo reboot

Now, install Apache

sudo apt-get install apache2 php libapache2-mod-php

install PHP and the extensions with the apt package manager

sudo apt install php php-cli php-fpm php-json php-common php-mysql php-zip php-gd php-mbstring php-curl php-xml php-pear php-bcmath

Verify PHP Version

php --version

In Google Cloud console on your instance copy external IP and type it in a browser to verify that Apache is running:

Do not use https:// in the URL as the encrypted connection is not configured at this moment and the page won’t open.

Alternatively, you can install a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack by Google Click to Deploy automatically.

Upload files on the server.

If you don’t have a connection to your instance check this guide on how to connect to Google Cloud VM Instance.

Map your domain name to your instance.

Reserving a static external IP address
In the Cloud Console click
VPC Network > External IP addresses
In the column Type of your instance select Static

Pointing your domain at your web server IP
Create an A record in your DNS Management console and copy/paste your external IP address.
Create a CNAME record for WWW subdomain and point it to your naked domain.

It usually takes effect within a few next hours.