vizit.nnov.ru was the site of the Vizit group of companies, a trade complex at the 384th kilometer of the Moscow — Nizhny Novgorod federal highway[1]. The domain was hosted in the nnov.ru Nizhny Novgorod zone, and the site entered our survey as a member of the nn.ru directory, from which its directory description was taken (see Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating). The only surviving substantive snapshot of the home page is dated December 2011, but the news feed on it breaks off in February 2009[1]. By January 2016 the address was serving a default web server placeholder page[2].

What it was

The home page traced the company's history back to 1998: "The Vizit group of companies begins its history in 1998, when the Vizit café opened at the 384th km of the Moscow-Nizhny Novgorod federal highway," as the home page stated[1]. It went on to say that the café "gradually grew into a trade complex offering a wide range of services," and that subsidiary enterprises appeared as it developed[1].

At the time of the snapshot the group included: the Vizit trade complex, Nika-service, a workshop for sewing car seat covers and upholstery, a workshop producing milled (peeled) log timber, and the Rodina kolkhoz (collective farm)[1]. The home page listed its lines of business separately: wholesale and retail trade in spare parts and auto accessories for domestic and imported trucks; auto repair and tire-fitting services; production of sewn goods for car interiors; freight dispatching services; legal and security services; catering; construction of wooden houses from milled log timber; and agriculture[1]. The directory description under which the site was listed in the nn.ru rubricator added to this list a café and restaurant, a hotel, and a parking lot — that is, the full roadside package for long-haul truckers.

What the site looked like

The home page was built as a feed of short news items with date headlines ("February 2009", "January 2009") and references to internal sections of the site — the sections "Catering" and "Construction of Wooden Houses" are mentioned[1]. Below that came a description of the company and a list of its enterprises, and the page closed with the line "Vizit Group of Companies. All rights reserved" and the slogan "We work for you!"[1].

Three surviving news items give a cross-section of the crisis year 2009. In February it was announced that a direct phone line to the group's management had been launched: "Call us with your wishes and suggestions, complaints and problems, and let's solve them TOGETHER!" — as the home page stated, giving the number +7 951 908 64 42 and hours from 8:00 to 20:00[1]. That same February an announcement was dated about the introduction of an "'anti-crisis' menu" at the café, with a meal priced at 100 rubles[1]. In January 2009 the company reported that it had won a tender to build five houses in the town of Lyskovo[1]. Neither a postal address nor a landline number with the 831 area code appeared on the surviving portion of the page — the only contact was a mobile number.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site belonged to that layer of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet that was made not for an audience but for business: a roadside complex set up a page as a business card and a signboard visible from a federal highway. In the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru counter, vizit.nnov.ru does not appear, and its traffic is not recorded in our data; it entered the nn.ru directory by category, not by rating. In the surviving results table of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote, the domain likewise does not appear[5].

How it closed

According to our survey, the domain's first web-archive snapshot is dated late December 2002 — meaning the site had existed since at least that time. We have one substantive snapshot, from December 2011, and it shows a page that had not been updated since February 2009[1]. After that the trail breaks off: on 10 January 2016 the address was serving not a site but a standard web server message, "You are here because name vizit.nnov.ru points to this server. But site vizit.nnov.ru doesn't exist in web server's configuration"[2]. The same placeholder is in place in the snapshots from July 2019[3] and June 2022[4].

Thus the domain name remained delegated and pointed to a live server for many years after the site itself was taken out of service: according to our survey, the web archive recorded requests to vizit.nnov.ru as late as April 2024, but no snapshot with site content after 2011 has survived. Archived snapshots of the home page say nothing about the fate of the Vizit group of companies itself.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2011 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2016 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2019 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2022 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Results of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote, 2004 (archive)