Nairaland is not working: Error 522

Has Nairaland been hacked? This was one of the first questions that came to my mind when I recently tried visiting Nigeria's biggest and oldest internet forum . I had tried visiting Nairaland for about 3 times this week and the website is just not working at all. Some Nigerian bloggers have confirmed that Nairaland has gone offline for about 2 days now - 24th and 25th of June 2014.

A visit to Nairaland's home page shows a sort of cached homepage which seems to be served by a web resource known as Cloudflare. CloudFlare makes Nairaland's homepage appear to be active even though it's an offline and cached version that is normally displayed. They do this using what they call CloudFlare's Always Online technology. However, other links from Nairaland's home page are not online as they are not available since the server is not responding. It would have been nicer if CloudFlare's always online technology which Nairaland was using actually extended to other pages of the website to at least provide an archived page for search engine traffic.

Also, trying to go to the boards and topic from hyperlinks provided on Nairaland shows that they are not working but rather displays the message "Error 522". Cloudflare claims to be doing it's own job(I'm not yet sure what that is) but that Nairaland's web host is not. Isn't time for Nairaland to change to a new web host? I suggest Nairaland try out Bluehost's dedicated server plan.

Already, some Nigerian blogs have started talking about it and there seems to be no consensus on what really happened.

Some bloggers mentioned that Nairaland has been hacked, some say it is just down, others claim they might be having problems with their web host. Personally, I think someone might have tampered with the source code somewhere or something like that. Who knows, perhaps, Nairaland is probably just getting too old to remain active as it used to. Has Nairaland reached its growth peak and set for a decline? Is Seun no longer able to keep Nairaland active? However, there are online forums older and bigger than Nairaland that are still active and so Nairaland's case should not be an exception. Seun might need to hire more web experts to help him make decisions in keeping Nairaland always online. I somehow feel confident that the problem will be rectified soonest by the weekend because this is not the first time Nairaland has gone offline. Seun is capable enough to handle the issue.

Curiously though, the website owner, Seun Osewa has not officially publicized what exactly happened to Nairaland but just apologized for the poor service on his Twitter page with hope of restoring it later on. However, he is not guaranteeing it would be a quick recovery.

Who would be affected by Nairaland's absence? I think a lot of people actually. A lot of people were affected by the downtime which Nairaland is currently experiencing. The first are Nairaland members who make posts or read other people's post on a frequent basis. They would miss the social environment which Nairaland offers them while it was online. Last time I checked, Nairaland had already clocked over 1 million members. A second group of people who are affected by Nairaland A.W.O.L. are information seekers who mostly visit the website for reviews and information. At times people searching for user opinion of a product or service would be invited to Nairaland from searches made on networks like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Nairaland ranks really high for most queries relating to Nigeria and these group of people may or may not be arleady registered members of Nairaland but they'd find that even if Nairaland were archived and no longer active, they'd still want to be reading the archives for the long term.

A third group of people who would be affected by Nairaland's down time are the advertisers. In the past, Nairaland has been solely monetized by Google Adsense but lately, given the growth of the Nigerian online advertising market, Nairaland has opted to sell direct ads, a system that allows them to offer a flat rate to advertisers to targeted pages on their website. Nairaland is estimated to be making at least N1,000,000 monthly from those advertisers per month if not more given the amount of unique traffic it gets and it's Alexa ranking among Nigerian websites. Some of these advertisers might have already signed a contract with Nairaland prior to this down time and their campaigns would have been suspended automatically given that the website has been offline. They would have a right to a refund or get Nairaland to extend their advertising campaigns a a form of compensation.

How will Nairaland be affected by its offline period? Well, it would make less money since it won't be able to sell new adverts. It would also lose traffic from search engines and this could get serious if it remains offline for the long term.

How does one access web pages on Nairaland while it is online? Well, you can try going to websites that keep a copy of web archives. You'd be able to see an archived copy of web pages on Nairaland there.