Rescuing a site from a previous supplier

Most people find out their website is not theirs at the moment they need to change it. The domain is registered to the supplier, the hosting too, nobody has ever seen the code, and the only person who knows where everything is has stopped answering the phone.

It is not always bad intent. Often it is simply that nobody thought to deal with it while everything was fine.

How it can be solved

The first step is to find out what you actually have. Who is registered as the domain holder, where the site physically runs, what data can be pulled out and what of it can be saved. This can be established even without the cooperation of the original supplier, because part of this information is public.

Then the domain is transferred to you, the content is moved and the site is rebuilt on accounts you own. In most cases this happens without the site going down even for an hour.

When the original thing cannot be saved

Sometimes it is wiser to rebuild than to dig through what is there. The company running NLP Akadémia’s podcast app shut down. I took the original app apart, worked out exactly what it did, and rebuilt it in three days. Theirs this time.

Running the new one costs nothing, because it has no server to look after.

My supplier stopped answering. What now?

This is the most common reason people call me. The first thing to do is find out who the domain is registered to, because much of that record is public and you do not need their consent to read it. That tells you whether this is a transfer or a rebuild.

Until that is settled the site keeps running. Nothing gets switched off and nothing has to happen in a hurry.

Who owns a website somebody built for me?

It depends on what you have in writing. Without a contract the copyright in the code stays with whoever wrote it, but the content, the data and the domain are yours. In practice the dispute is almost never about the code, it is about the credentials.

I am not a lawyer and I will say so. The practical part, who holds the access and how to get it back, can usually be handled without one.

I cannot access the domain, can it be moved?

In most cases yes. A domain has a registered holder, and if that is you or your company, the registrar will restore access after verifying your identity. If the supplier is the holder, it is a transfer and that needs their cooperation, or it gets solved with a new domain.

Moving to a new provider can be done without the site going down. It keeps running in the old place until the new one is ready, and only then switches over.

What you get from it

The domain, hosting, database and code all in your name. This is not an add-on service; I do it this way on every project from day one, precisely so you never end up in the situation you are in now.