nino.ru is the server domain of the closed joint-stock company Nizhny Novgorod Information Networks (NIS), a Nizhny Novgorod internet provider that operated from 1991. The domain never had a website of its own: the root address held the provider's mail login, while all of the actual content was carried by fifty-eight subdomains — sites of firms, schools, clubs, hobby groups, and private individuals. The Web Archive preserved about 184,000 addresses and 371,000 snapshots from the domain; the earliest dates to March 4, 2000, and the last live one to September 2021 [1]. The freed-up domain was registered anew on October 4, 2022, and since then a "Domain for sale" page has stood at this address [2].

What This Domain Was

The root of nino.ru never carried a website. In 2008 the address was answered by Apache, which denied access to the root directory, and the real name of the machine showed through in the error message — rblinfo.nino.ru [3]. Later, webmail was placed at the root: in 2010 it was Horde with the IMP module, in 2011 an unbranded RoundCube [4], and from 2013 the same RoundCube received the header "Start Telecom Mail" and stood under it until August 2021 [5].

The latter name explains where the provider went. By 2009 the NIS website was redirecting visitors to nnov.starttelecom.ru, and the subscribers' mail domain moved along with the business and kept working for another twelve years — longer than most of the sites that once stood on it.

Hosting on nino.ru was heterogeneous, and this is visible in the structure of the addresses: alongside the sites of firms and personal pages lived the provider's service names — intercard.nino.ru and internetcard.nino.ru for internet cards, stat, speed, and speedtest for measurements, smtp and fido, as well as five trial nodes — test, test1, test2, test4, and test7 — which the Web Archive's crawler visited until 2005.

A Provider's Showcase, Not Just Rented Space

The main page of the NIS website had an "Our Projects" block, and the banners in it led to subdomains of nino.ru. In August 2000 these were "Nizhny Novgorod Yellow Pages", the school project "Terra Incognita", and "Partnership Council" [6]; in March 2001, Logotype Free", the Nizhny Novgorod mirror of Maxim Moshkov's library, and a page of internet maps [7]; in January 2002, Nina Pributkovskaya's personal page was added to them, along with the same school "Terra" [8].

In other words, some of the subdomains served as the company's own showcase: the provider kept city directories and a library on them alongside its own services. The office — the Network Technologies Center of CJSC "NIS" — was located at 2 Kostina Street, and later the sales department moved to 20 Korolenko Street [6].

Graphit web studio

Some of the sites on the domain were made by a single hand. The pages of Vadim Rybakov, Andrey Osipovich Karelin, "Chudilnik", TreeGraph, and the school "Terra Incognita" share a common template — a heading of the form "Name ::" and a single stylesheet, /main/_main.css — and the markup's service field carries the signature "Graphit studio info@graphit.ru" [9].

The studio did not belong to the provider: in its own portfolio NIS appears as a client since July 5, 1999, meaning they were partners — the studio made the sites, and the provider gave them space. Their connection is visible in the news: on August 22, 2000, the NIS website reported "new works by the Graphit web studio" — the sites of OJSC "Sibur-Neftekhim" and the "Extra-N" Publishing House [6]. The subdomain siburneftehim.nino.ru did indeed survive in the archive, though only in two snapshots from March 2001 [1]. The heading of one of the school project's pages ended with the words "Graphit Server" — this is how the studio's server was labeled inside the provider's domain [1].

By 2003, the studio's own website was sitting at the "Yellow Pages" address, and its portfolio shows who built the Nizhny Novgorod internet of the early 2000s: the official website of the Government of Nizhny Novgorod Region, the websites of the Union of Right Forces party and its State Duma faction, VolgaTelecom, and NNIITO. The studio's own website management system, TreeGraph, ran on half of the domain's subdomains, while its demo lived on a separate subdomain.

City directories and catalogs

This branch of the domain organized the city by category:

  • yellowpages.nino.ru — "Nizhny Novgorod Yellow Pages — 2000," 7,692 addresses, snapshots from March 2000 to May 2007; from 2003 the website of the Grafit studio was located at the same address
  • cars.nino.ru — NetCARS, a car catalog (2000–2010), and separately autonn.nino.ru — "Nizhny Novgorod Car Market" (2002–2008)
  • videoprokat.nino.ru — a video rental shop on Marshal Voronov Street (2005–2006), weekend.nino.ru — the guide "Rest and Entertainment to the Fullest" (2001)

Libraries, schools, and education

The second-largest branch of the domain was educational:

  • students.nino.ru — "Student Campus", a Nizhny Novgorod student portal: 16,398 addresses, 2001–2021 — one of the longest-lived websites on the domain
  • moshkow.nino.ru — the Nizhny Novgorod mirror of Maxim Moshkov's library (Lib.Ru), 8,557 addresses, 2001–2009
  • terra.nino.ru — "School Terra Incognita" of the Nizhegorodsky District Education Department and Lyceum No. 8 (1999–2010)
  • vmk.nino.ru — the correspondence department of the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics at Nizhny Novgorod State University (2003–2005)
  • sono.nino.ru — a reference guide to ultrasound diagnostics with an atlas of echograms and an English version (2000–2012)

Clubs, hobbies, and personal pages

The provider's domain was also home to private websites — the genre that had moved over to blogs by the mid-2000s:

  • cactus.nino.ru — Cactus League, "useful for cactus maniacs, cactus lovers, and cactologists" (2000–2013)
  • velo.nino.ru — "Nizhny Novgorod Bicycle Project," later "Bicycle Nizhny" (2002–2021)
  • chudilo.nino.ru — the online magazine "Chudilnik" (2001–2009), nippon.nino.ru — a Japanese-themed site (2003–2005), treegraph.nino.ru — a demonstration of a website management system (2001–2020)
  • mj.nino.ru — a site about motorboats and fishing (2003–2013)
  • Personal pages: karelin.nino.ru — a biography of the photographer Andrey Osipovich Karelin (1999–2021), rybakov.nino.ru — the artist, designer, and animator Vadim Rybakov (2001–2021), pributkovskaya.nino.ru — Nina Pributkovskaya (2001–2020), kazakov.nino.ru — the portfolio of Aleksey Kazakov (2002–2005), max.nino.ru — a page with its own forum (2001–2013), as well as ikurylev, nikische, yurik, and polik

Companies

Corporate sites on the domain usually outlived their owners on the web only briefly:

  • online.nino.ru — the OnLine company, computer equipment sales and system integration, 3,382 addresses (2000–2017): the longest corporate lifespan on the domain
  • gama.nino.ru — the Gama travel agency (2001–2006), sknn.nino.ru — the Novy Nizhny construction company (2007), siburneftehim.nino.ru — OJSC Sibur-Neftekhim (2001)
  • ands.nino.ru — a developer of warehouse and inventory accounting software (2002–2007)
  • nctech.nino.ru — NCT company: the only thing left on the surviving page is a notice of its move to nctsoft.com [10]
  • rf-slf.nino.ru (2001–2008), vars, mosnar, zebra, ipro — sites of which only the addresses and almost nothing else remain in the archive
  • partnership.nino.ru — "Partnership Council" (2000–2007)

The largest section — logo.nino.ru

Two-thirds of the domain's entire archive falls on a single subdomain. logo.nino.ru accounts for 127,733 unique addresses and about 204,000 snapshots from May 10, 2000 to September 12, 2022 — that is, longer than the provider's own mail service operated. It was an archive of free 88×31 logo buttons, and its reach was nationwide: on March 28, 2002, the counter on the home page showed 2,087,700 downloads and 335,305,770 KB of files served, with 142,745 requests in a single day [11].

For comparison: the second-largest, "Student Town," accounts for 16,398 addresses, the mirror of the Moshkov library for 8,557, and "Yellow Pages" for 7,692.

Hosting within hosting, and other people's subjects

Two of the domain's subdomains were not sites but platforms. pages.nino.ru hosted the pages of three dozen or so small clients, each with its own folder: from a motor-oil dealer to a philosophical monograph on intellectual property, 112 kilobytes in a single file [1].

And whoiswho.nino.ru was home to a subject that had nothing at all to do with Nizhny Novgorod: an alphabetical index of the encyclopedia "Naukova Elita Odeshchyny" — about scholars of Odesa Region, in Ukrainian, with sections "elite" and "depytat" (2007–2013) [12]. Such things happened on provider hosting: space was sold to everyone, and nobody cared about the client's geography.

How it ended

The domain died slowly and piece by piece. Corporate sites crumbled first — by the end of the 2000s — while personal pages and clubs held out longest: "Student Town" was last captured on September 28, 2021, the bicycle site on September 23, Karelin's page on September 17, and Rybakov's on May 18 of the same year [1]. The mail login at the root was last saved on August 17, 2021 [5].

Then the domain became available. On October 4, 2022, it was registered anew to a private individual through RU-CENTER [2]; it is paid up through October 4, 2027. There has been no content on it since: archived snapshots from 2024 show a page reading "Domain for sale. Buy in the RU-CENTER domain store" [13], and not one of the fifty-eight sites responds at its former address.

Along with the domain, the arrangement it exemplified has vanished too: the provider kept on its subdomains city directories and a school website, a mirror of a library and an artist's personal page, and the web studio affiliated with it built those sites. A domain of one's own then cost money and trouble, and an address of the form name.nino.ru was a perfectly normal place of residence for a Nizhny Novgorod website.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org (archive)
  2. tcinet.ru — Technical Center of the Internet
  3. web.archive.org — Root of nino.ru, snapshot of July 5, 2008 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — RoundCube mail login at nino.ru, snapshot of April 27, 2011 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — "Start Telecom Mail" at nino.ru, snapshot of August 17, 2021 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — Home page of nis.nnov.su, snapshot of August 22, 2000 (archive)
  7. web.archive.org — Home page of nis.nnov.su, snapshot of March 2, 2001 (archive)
  8. web.archive.org — Home page of nis.nnov.su, snapshot of January 23, 2002 (archive)
  9. web.archive.org — Personal page of Vadim Rybakov, snapshot of March 2, 2001 (archive)
  10. web.archive.org — NCT company, snapshot of August 23, 2000 (archive)
  11. web.archive.org — "Logotype Free", snapshot of March 28, 2002 (archive)
  12. web.archive.org — Index of the "Encyclopedia 'Naukova Elita Odeshchyny'", snapshot of May 13, 2008 (archive)
  13. web.archive.org — Domain sale page, snapshot of October 10, 2024 (archive)