"Yevrotail Privolzhye" (ceramic-tile.ru) was the website of a Nizhny Novgorod supplier of ceramic tiles that operated in the early 2000s. In the nn.ru website catalogue, on which the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating was based, the address was listed under the name "Ceramic Tile" with the description: the website of the Nizhny Novgorod representative office of the ceramic tile manufacturer OAO Stroyfarfor. The home page itself was signed with the name "Yevrotail Privolzhye" (Eurotile Volga Region); the earliest snapshot preserved by the web archive is dated 30 January 2003, and the copyright notice on it reads 2002[1]. Later the domain passed to an Astrakhan tile shop, and by 2025 to online casino pages.

The 2003 page: a conversation with a wholesaler, not with a shopper

The preserved home page is short and is addressed not to a private buyer but to a professional participant in the market. The text states outright whom the offer was meant for: those who deal professionally in building materials and represent a retail chain, a construction company or a distributor[1]. The page is built as a chain of questions to the visitor — about the quality of the tiles, about reputation and the trust of customers, about readiness to work with professionals and about prices direct from the manufacturer — followed by an invitation to assess the offer[1].

The upper part of the page was taken up by a login form: the fields "user name" and "password" and a request to register, "after which you will gain access to additional materials"[1]. Judging by that wording, part of the site's content was open only to registered partners; what exactly was kept there cannot be established from the preserved text of the home page. The page carries almost no public details: no telephone number, no warehouse or office address — the only contact left open is the e-mail address design@ceramic-tile.ru[1]. The page ended with the signature "Yevrotail Privolzhye" and a copyright notice for 2002[1].

Its place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site is known to us from the subject index of the nn.ru catalogue — the very catalogue from which the list of addresses for the archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet was compiled. No measurable trace of prominence has been left behind: in the collected data of the Counter.nn.ru rating, ceramic-tile.ru has neither a position nor a traffic figure, and the site is not named among the winners of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote[2]. For a closed wholesale resource that is to be expected: it was not looking for a mass audience, and the counter and the competition measured precisely that.

What became of the address afterwards

Between the 2003 snapshot and the next preserved texts of the home page there is a gap of almost two decades; what ceramic-tile.ru was during those years cannot be established from the available material. The snapshot of 17 May 2021 shows a different project and a different city at this address: the online shop "Keramiks" (Ceramix), with the telephone number +7 (8512) 784-555 (the 8512 code is that of Astrakhan) and the address "Russia, Astrakhan, 63 N. Ostrovskogo Street", open, according to the page, from Monday to Friday from 10:00 to 19:00 and at weekends from 10:00 to 17:00[3]. The shop called itself the official representative of the Iranian factory FAKHAR in Astrakhan and stated that the tiles came "from the factory by sea to the port of Astrakhan"; the storefront had the sections "Floor", "Wall" and "For the kitchen" and prices of the order of 1230–2589 roubles per item[3].

By the snapshot of 6 July 2022 the site had been rebuilt on the Tilda website builder, the heading read "Ceramic tiles and porcelain stoneware in Astrakhan", the address had changed to 21A Rybinskaya Street, the owner was given as an individual entrepreneur, and the supplier was by then the Iranian factory PARS Tile[4]. This period has no bearing on the Nizhny Novgorod history of the address.

How the domain ended

The last snapshots have nothing to do either with tiles or with trade: on 8 February 2025 ceramic-tile.ru carried a page of the online casino "Crypto Boss" with text about working mirror sites and registration[5], while the last snapshot in the web archive, dated 12 May 2025, is a similar page of another casino, "Spinamba", with a note that it had been updated on 5 May 2025[6]. These pages have no relation either to the Nizhny Novgorod or to the Astrakhan project. The liveness check carried out in the course of the study records the state of the domain as "no domain": a live site no longer answers at this address.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day voting results, 2004 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2021 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2022 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Home page, February 2025 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — Home page, May 2025 (archive)