A company that took over a company that took over a company that in 2001 itself took over the company that had been hosting my website since its creation in May 1999 f**ked up! They rendered my site non-updatable and useless for anything other than a repository ... a repository with a number of flaws that I wanted to fix and make more consistent with the current Internet environment.
Now that website NO LONGER EXISTS.
What happens if Weebly, who have been doing a fine job hosting this site and blog since 2013, is entirely taken over by Square, and Square decides it will no longer support free websites? Enter my new second site at Site123. Yet that site is run by AI bots and tech staff that right now already keep bombarding me with requests to UPGRADE my new free site. To upgrade is the same thing as paying money on a monthly basis for what was once free.
$$$$$$$$ is part of the reason parts of the Internet are vanishing ... not "inactive" sites.
Another reason, of course is Death. And Death translates into sites that are no longer being updated with new content. Enter $$$$$$$ which sees this problem and terminates the work of a dead creator.
Unless, of course, you have a loving family that will pay to maintain what you worked for all those years before you passed. Such is the case of Kent Steadman who ran a popular website called CyberSpace Orbit until his untimely death of a heart attack at the fairly young age of 65 in April 2008 (65 is young today). You can see this site at his location: CyberSpace Orbit by Kent Steadman.
Some of you may have noticed that my old website, at least the form it was in from May 1999 to April 2005, can be accessed via the Pope John Paul II page from 2005 and the Pope Francis page from 2013 at Library of Congress. The entire site, virtually every page, was captured as it existed in 2005 when Pope John Paul II died. As for 2013, only the pope pages, the "Pope Benedict" page and the "Pope Francis" pages, were preserved. If you try to access other parts of the site using links on them, you will be kicked back to my site as it was in 2005.
Oh well, that is better than nothing!
Not so fortunate was the case of Robert Egan (also known as NostraBobus) who studied the medieval Green Language and asserted that at least some of Nostradamus' prophecies were created using the Green Language. He was a popular fixture at a place called Earth Changes TV which ran from 1995 to 2003 after which it switched in the direction of a weekly radio show.
Bob got booted. For several years he was one of a group of prophecy commentators who ran their own website (I have forgotten its name), each part of it belonging to an author, one part of it belonging to Mr. Egan. Then around the year 2006, 2007 or 2008, only in his 60's, the poor man got sick and then went blind. He ended up in a nursing home and I guess he later died. He began sending me all his work while he was still part of the composite website and I wondered why. I kept it in a special folder. Most of it was already published on my site at a page I called Nostradamus NOW, but some was not. Some of it, I believe, is still saved on a file I have to review that I kept for rainy days. But a lot of it was lost when my computer crashed. Also lost was Bob's email and thus, after the crash, I lost contact with him.
That is why, along with my material from the old website, I will be creating a special page or section, either here or at Site123, with Bob's work appearing on it.
Sabotage is another problem not mentioned. There is a war going on on the Internet (and has been going on since at least 2010 or longer): some countries do not like the content it sees being posted by other countries. So they pay people to SPAM the search results on major search engines of the offending sites and blogs with sites that redirect the viewer to malware or phony sites with gibberish. If they do this long enough, the site's pages, or some of its pages, may get de-listed (temporarily at least).
One other reason, not mentioned in the top article, that parts of the Internet are fading is due to ageism and the marginalization by the younger generation of work by older creators such as myself. Add to that the devastation caused by "cancel culture" and it is clear that, unlike the ill-fated Library of Alexandria, the barbarians are not at the gates of the Internet but are already inside ... and some of them are running it!