A website you pay for but cannot touch
The phone number on the contact page is out of date. You need to add a new service. Someone emails the freelancer who built the site and gets no reply. The mobile number goes to voicemail. The invoice for hosting still arrives every year, or maybe it has stopped arriving, which is worse.
Nobody in the business has a login. Nobody is quite sure where the site is hosted, who the domain is registered to, or whether the email on your domain depends on the same account.
Why this happens so often
It is rarely bad faith. A freelancer buys the domain and hosting on their own card to get the project moving, meaning to transfer them later. The site launches, everyone is pleased, and the transfer never happens. Years pass. The freelancer changes career, moves abroad or just stops checking that inbox.
The root cause is that nothing in the original agreement said the business must own the accounts. The website was treated as a thing that was delivered, rather than a set of accounts and files that someone has to hold.
What it is costing you
| Risk | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Out of date information | Wrong phone numbers, old prices, staff who left still listed |
| Domain renewal lapses | Website and email stop working on the same day |
| Security holes | No updates applied, so the site is an easy target |
| No backups you can reach | If the host deletes the account, the site is gone |
| Paralysis | Marketing plans stall because nobody can change a page |
The domain is the one to worry about first. If it expires while registered to someone you cannot contact, recovering it becomes much harder, and your email goes down with it.
How we get your website back
- Map what exists. We look up the domain's registrar and nameservers, identify the host from the site's DNS and server details, and work out which services, such as email, depend on which account.
- Recover the domain. Registrars have processes for proving you are the business the domain represents. We help you gather the evidence they ask for, such as company documents and invoices, and follow their process through to transfer.
- Recover or copy the site. If the host will verify you as the owner, we get access to the account. If not, we take a full copy of the public site so nothing is lost while access is sorted out.
- Move everything into accounts in your business's name, with your email address on them and two-factor login switched on.
- Check the site for anything worrying: outdated software, unknown admin users, signs of compromise.
- Write it all down: where each account lives, who has access, what renews when, and how to reach the site's admin area.
Once access is back, we give you an honest view of the site itself. Sometimes it is fine and just needs updating. Sometimes it is built on something so old that rebuilding is cheaper than repairing, and we explain why.
Where you end up
You own the domain, the hosting and the site, in accounts registered to the business. More than one person in the company can log in. There is a single document explaining how it all fits together, so the next person who works on it, whether that is us or someone else, starts from a clear picture.
You can change a phone number the same day you need to, instead of waiting on someone who is not coming back.
Does this sound like your website?
- Nobody in the business has an admin login for the site
- You do not know which company the domain is registered with
- Hosting is paid by, or through, the person who built it
- Emails to the developer go unanswered
- Your business email runs on the same domain
- Small changes have been waiting for months