LinkExpats

» see linkexpats.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

I have never been an expatriate. I was born in Turkey and I work in Ankara, so the one category of website that has never had anything to offer me is the one built for people who moved abroad and need to find others who did the same. LinkExpats was that site for eleven years. The social web carried a lot of these once, modest and run by one person, before the category hardened around a couple of winners.

Rali Kettani, a Moroccan then in his late twenties and based in the United States, launched it in October 2007. The pitch was ordinary and it was the right ordinary: somewhere members could swap advice on finding a flat and track down other people of their own nationality in whatever city they had landed in. The first archived capture is 26 October 2007.

By February 2011 The National counted 4,000 members, of whom 800 lived in the United Arab Emirates. That concentration is why a newspaper in Abu Dhabi came to profile a site operated from Virginia, and it remains the only membership figure anyone outside the company ever published.

Its Wikipedia article is still up, created on 1 September 2010 by an account called Expensive1981 and expanded from a handful of US addresses. Kettani was twenty-nine in February 2011. The article carries no death date, because the person who wrote it was the only person likely to have added one.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ counted by member id ~

The homepage never advertised a member count. For a social network of that era the absence is itself a figure, since everybody who had numbers put them above the fold. What the site did have was sequential profile URLs, one integer per account, and the Internet Archive crawled enough of them that you can reconstruct the growth curve from the highest ID visible on any given date.

5,743 by the end of 2011, 8,407 in January 2013, 12,428 in July 2014, and 16,220 on 27 November 2015. That works out to somewhere between 1,200 and 3,000 registrations a year across the whole life of the thing. InterNations and Expatica both outlived it comfortably.

~ what a lapsed invoice looks like ~

The site was frozen long before it stopped. Its last working capture, taken at 22:45 on 18 August 2018, still carries a footer reading "© Copyright 2013", so nothing substantive shipped in the final five years. The live activity feed by then had decayed into spam registrations announcing that axdxas is living in asdar.

Seven weeks later, on 7 October 2018, every URL on the host answers identically. The homepage, robots.txt, the stylesheets and the country flag images all return a 302 to p3nlhclust404.shr.prod.phx3.secureserver.net, which is GoDaddy's redirect for an expired shared Windows hosting account. Nothing was migrated anywhere and no notice went up.

After that the domain vanishes from the archive for six years and eight months. The first TLS certificate ever issued for linkexpats.com is dated 25 May 2025, a hosting panel auto-provisioning a reclaimed name, and the only reason it is the first is that the site ran on plain HTTP for its entire existence. The apex answers a 58-byte 403 today, and one surviving deep URL serves a French parking page selling travel and insurance ads against the name.

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