nauto.ru — the domain of the Nizhny Novgorod company NizhegorodAvto LLC (Russian: ООО «НижегородАвто»), which, according to the description in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet directory nn.ru (section /rub/), was engaged in "sales and servicing of Skoda, Hyundai, GAZ cars," "maintenance and repair of Volkswagen, Audi cars," and "tuning of 'Volga' cars"[1]. Snapshots preserved in the web archive span the period from 2001 to 2021[2][4].

What NizhegorodAvto did and what the site showed

The earliest preserved snapshot of the home page, dated 27 November 2001, was titled "NizhegorodAVTO" and consisted of a news feed of the Nizhny Novgorod car market. As the home page stated, "'NizhegorodAvto' is the only firm in Nizhny Novgorod that can offer certified Hyundai Terracan cars to its customers"[2]. The same feed carried notes about a new station-wagon-bodied modification of the Skoda Superb, about Hyundai Motor Co.'s plans to build an assembly plant in Europe, and about the imminent arrival of the Škoda Fabia Sedan Comfort on the Nizhny Novgorod market[2]. The actual list of services — sales and service of Skoda, Hyundai and GAZ, repair of Volkswagen and Audi, tuning of the "Volga" — is known from the nn.ru directory listing rather than from the text of the snapshots themselves[1]. The Skoda dealership is also confirmed independently: in the "ŠKODA Dealers and Service Stations" section of the Skoda owners' club forum, a thread about the Nizhny Novgorod "NizhegorodAvto" has been running since 25 May 2008, naming a showroom in pavilion No. 2 of the Nizhny Novgorod Fair on Sovnarkomovskaya Street, 13, and a service center with a postal address on Kerchenskaya Street, 15; in November 2008 forum members called the firm the sole Skoda dealer in Nizhny Novgorod[5].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site was listed in the Nizhny Novgorod internet directory nn.ru, in the /rub/ section[1]. In the preserved samples of Counter.nn.ru and in the voting data of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day, no information about nauto.ru is recorded in our material — for more on how the rating was constructed and the coverage of the samples, see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating[1].

Fate of the address

By June 2017, the address nauto.ru no longer displayed the car dealership's storefront but a service stub page from the hosting provider "Internet Hosting Center" (Russian: «Интернет Хостинг Центр»): the page stated "The site's hosting does not exist or has been disabled," gave instructions for the site owner — contact technical support, use an FTP client such as FileZilla and phpMyAdmin to work with the database — and advertised the provider's own hosting and domain-registration services[3]. By 18 December 2021, the domain had dropped out of hosting altogether: the snapshot captures a page from the registrar REG.RU with the heading "The registration period for the domain nauto.ru has expired," offering to renew the domain, intercept it, or pick a similar one through the registrar's service[4]. The identity of the site is not beyond doubt across this whole path: two decades passed between the car dealership's substantive news feed of 2001 and the expired-domain page of 2021, and the last snapshot in the collected material that still clearly shows the car business dates from 2001. When checked in August 2026, the site at this address was responding.

Sources

  1. nauto.ru — nn.ru directory listing, /rub/
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2017 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Domain page, 2021 (archive)
  5. forum.skoda-club.ru — NizhegorodAvto (Nizhny Novgorod), thread in the "ŠKODA Dealers and Service Stations" section, since 2008