Virb Hosting Shutdown – How to Recover Your Lost Website Content?

Virb website (owned by Media Temple) is/was a website builder/hosting platform that lets users create websites. Sadly, for many website owners, their websites went down as the website hosting service closed without sending any advanced warning to their clients – which is very irresponsible of them. I can’t imagine how stressful it can be if you were affected by it. Gladly, there are ways to recover content and rebuild your site elsewhere.

How to Recover your Website when Hosting Shutdown?

Let’s look at what options website owners have for recovering their content if you are one of the affected Virb customers;

• Can I recover my files from a website whose hosting is discontinued? In most cases, No.
  • Check if you still have access to the cPanel to download a backup of your website. I guess, speaking to Virb customers on social channels this wasn’t an option. Have you tried sending an email to help@virb.com?
  • Contact your hosting service provider over email or raise a ticket asking them for a backup of your website. Again, speaking to Virb customers on social channels wasn’t an option. Nevertheless worth trying to reach out to them via the following Twitter handles @Verb / @GoDaddy / @GoDaddyHelp / @mediatemp / @mediatemplehelp. Or via their Facebook page.
• If you don’t have any site backups, use the Wayback machine to access the older version of your website. Visit https://archive.org/web/web.php, a service that can be used to save copies of old websites. Save as much of the content as you can and then copy and paste that content into a new website builder such as a self-hosted platform like WordPress for example. You would, however, need to re-design it again. This is a recommended way as it will save you from having to rewrite the copy all over again and you can save images of your pages to guide your next build to rebuild it elsewhere. I don’t personally recommend these, but for non-coders, there are other options like Wix, Squarespace or Weebly.

• You could also recover site content via Google Cache. To view, the cached versions of your site pages, enter cache:website.com (replace the website with your domain name) on Google search or simply visit CachedView.com. Do this for all your site pages. If you are pages are cached, you are in luck. You can then save the site content and images as soon as possible.

• You could also recover site content via Bing Cache. To view, the cached versions of your site pages, search for your domain name on bing.com. Click on the arrow that appears next to the URL and look for the “Cached” link and click on it.

You should regularly create site backups (backup your files and databases) and store them locally no matter what your hosting provider promises you or if you’re setting yourself up for failure.

If you were one of the affected people who have lost their website due to a web host suddenly shutting down and managed to rebuild it or know other ways to recover your site content, please let others know how you did it via the comments section!