How to view Nairaland's web pages when it's offline

At times, even a big website like Nairaland can go offline. Nairaland is Nigeria's biggest internet forum as at the time of writing this and is most likely going to remain so for the long term.

Lately, however, the online Nigerian forum has been experiencing some web server problems such as the "Error 522" which thousands of visitors might have noticed when trying to visit the website.

It can a bit annoying, deceptive or just time consuming to be taken to a non working website after making an urgent query on search engines like Google and Bing on keywords related to Nigeria. Many would notice that user generated content websites like Nairaland tend to get listed first in the search results but this is of no use if the referred website is not available to be viewed.

I've noticed this lately on sites like Nairaland and won't blame Google for not making updates soon since they take about 3 months or so to reflect working websites. The main question then should be: What does someone do when a website like Nairaland is not working even though search engines like Google shows that it has useful information? How do you view websites like Nairaland when they are offline for one reason or the other?

Well, there is a solution to this - Just look for the archived verison of the website.

There are many websites that offer users the ability to view archived or old versions of particular websites and this is mostly helpful when a particular website is not available.

You can try going to sites like Google.com or archive.com. For the website like Nairaland.com, you can view it's saved homepage at http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=http://www.nairaland.com. If you want to view other hidden pages, just replace the homepage url with the exact webpage's location

For checking Nairaland's archived webpages, you can just go to http://web.archive.org/web/http://www.nairaland.com

With these websites that store old versions of websites, you can always have access to information you need on particular websites. I prefer using Google's cache when looking for quick information else I just go to archive.com.