WPlus archive maintenance hub

Hosting archives reliably

Purpose: Infrastructure patterns for serving older URLs as predictable static pages, with explicit routing, safe defaults, and low operational overhead.

What “reliable” looks like for legacy URLs

Reliability for older sites is mostly predictability: the same URL should keep behaving the same way over time. Static files and explicit routing reduce surprises, and the remaining work is operational hygiene: repeatable deployments, conservative configuration, and clear handling for disallowed paths.

Reliability starts with predictable URL-to-file mapping

Static archival hosting works best when the mapping from URL to file path is boring and consistent. A trailing slash URL should resolve to an index.html in the matching folder, while “file-like” legacy URLs (for example .htm or .shtml) should be created as literal filenames. The objective is not to recreate an old CMS; it is to ensure that real pages exist for the most-linked paths so that crawlers, users, and monitoring tools see stable responses.

Subdomains are treated as separate roots. That keeps concerns separated and reduces cross-contamination: a change for one legacy host does not risk breaking another. In an Nginx deployment, each host can map directly to a folder, and the build output can be uploaded atomically with a single sync.

Cache behaviour that helps archives

Archives are ideal candidates for caching because the content changes rarely. Serving with strong cache headers for CSS and conservative caching for HTML gives both users and crawlers fast responses without risking stale critical metadata. If you make content updates, you can bump a CSS version via filename changes (or simply rely on conservative cache durations for assets in small archives).

When you do update HTML, keep it incremental: update the stub content, preserve canonical URLs, and avoid flipping internal paths. Stability is part of the product.

Backups and repeatable deployments

A static site should be treated like an artifact: produced from source content, validated, and then deployed. Keep the output in version control or in a reproducible pipeline, and keep a copy of the deployed tree. For legacy sites, the most common “emergency” is accidental deletion or accidental redirects; both are prevented by having a known-good tree that can be re-synced quickly.

Because the site is static, “restore” is usually just “re-upload.” That is a major operational advantage compared to databases or dynamic stacks that require patch management, migration, and runtime dependencies.

Deployment checklist (static archive)

This checklist is intentionally simple and tuned for static hosting where URL stability matters more than application features.

Keep hosts separate: treat wplus.net and www.wplus.net as distinct sites when they have inbound links to distinct paths.
Use deterministic routing: prefer try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html; over broad redirects. Avoid “send everything to the homepage.”
Match canonical to routing: if a URL is directory-style, keep the trailing slash canonical and align the sitemap to that form.
Disable directory listings: archives should be navigable by intentional links, not auto-indexes.
Serve CSS with caching: allow long caching for /assets/ while keeping HTML caching conservative.
Return 410 for toxic legacy paths: don’t redirect “bad” paths; make them unambiguously gone.
Handle legacy extensions explicitly: if you serve HTML at a .wmv or .asx URL, override the content type for that exact path.

Example NGINX static hosting block

Keep routing explicit and add conservative caching for assets.

location / {
  try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
}

location /assets/ {
  expires 30d;
  add_header Cache-Control "public, max-age=2592000, immutable";
}

Common mistakes

Most incidents are incremental drift: small changes that quietly alter behavior.

Host-level redirects: redirecting an entire host (for example www → apex) breaks deep links and surprises users.
Trailing-slash inconsistency: mismatched URL forms create avoidable redirects and brittle behavior.
MIME misclassification: old “media” filenames can be served with a media MIME type even when you intend HTML. Monitor and override where needed.
Unreviewed changes on server: “quick fixes” in production are a common root cause of drift. Prefer redeploying the known-good build.
Accidental expansion: adding new sitewide navigation, outbound links, or dynamic features increases maintenance and risk. Keep archive stubs predictable.

Handling legacy error pages responsibly

Some of the highest-value inbound links in old web properties point to error documents, especially custom 403/404 pages that were shared or referenced. If those URLs have external links, they should exist as real HTML pages that explain what changed and where to go next. That prevents redirect leakage and makes it clear to both users and bots that the content is intentionally restored.

For example, WPlus restores the historically-linked 403 pages on subdomains as normal 200 pages with “archived page” framing. These are not live access-control responses; they are archival stubs that explain the legacy behaviour.