The website nobody has the login for
If the person who built your site has moved on, you may not control your own domain. Here is how to find out who does, and how to get it back.
You need one thing changed. The phone number, or the hours, or a price that has been wrong since spring. It is a five minute job for anyone who can get into the site.
Except nobody can. The person who built it was your nephew, or a guy somebody recommended, or a company that stopped replying two years ago. There is no login written down anywhere. There is possibly an email address that bounces.
So the site sits there with the wrong number on it, and every week a few people call it.
This is one of the most common situations we run into, and it is almost always fixable. It is just fixable in three separate pieces, because a website is three separate things that people assume are one thing.
The three pieces
Your domain name. The address itself, yoursite.ca. Rented yearly from a registrar, usually for around twenty dollars.
Your hosting. The server where the files live. Sometimes free, sometimes a monthly cost.
The website files. The actual pages, images and code.
These can all be in different places under different accounts, and losing access to one does not mean losing the others. The domain is the one that matters most, because whoever controls it controls where your business name points on the internet.
Find out who owns your domain
You can check this yourself in about a minute and you do not need any technical knowledge.
Search for "WHOIS lookup" and use any of the free tools that come up. Type in your domain.
You will get back a record showing the registrar, which is the company the domain is rented from, and the registration and expiry dates. The owner's name and email are often hidden behind a privacy service, which is normal and not a bad sign in itself.
What you are looking for is two things. Which registrar is it with, because that tells you where to start. And when does it expire, because that tells you how urgent this is.
If the expiry date is inside the next few months and you have no idea whose card is on file, deal with it now rather than later. A lapsed domain gets released, and business domains do get picked up by other people.
Getting each piece back
The domain. Contact the registrar's support and start a transfer or account recovery. They will ask you to prove you are the business. Expect to provide business registration documents and possibly a photo of ID. It is slower than you would like and it does work. If the domain is in a former developer's personal account and they are reachable, a polite request usually settles it faster than any formal process.
The hosting. Same idea. Work out who the host is, contact support, prove the business is yours. If you cannot identify the host at all, a WHOIS record or a tool that identifies hosting providers from a domain will usually tell you.
The files. Honestly, this is the piece worth caring least about. A five page website can be rebuilt in a couple of weeks. Your domain, with years of Google history attached to it, cannot be replaced.
Your Google Business Profile is a fourth thing entirely, and it has its own recovery process. If somebody else has it, you can request ownership through Google. They notify the current manager, and if there is no response within seven days the profile transfers to you.
The part people get wrong the next time
When you get it all back, or when you have a new site built, there is one decision that prevents this from ever happening again.
Register the domain in your own name, on your own card.
Not your developer's account with their card on file. Not "we'll handle that for you." Your business, your name, your payment method. It costs about twenty dollars a year and it means that whatever happens to your working relationship with anyone, the address your customers know still belongs to you.
Anyone reasonable will be fine with this. If somebody resists it, that tells you something worth knowing before you hire them.
The same applies to your Google Business Profile. It should be verified in your name, with your web person added as a manager. Managers can be removed. Owners cannot, easily.
Write down four things
Once you have sorted it out, put these somewhere that is not one person's memory. A note in your accounting software, a sealed envelope in the safe, whatever you will actually be able to find in three years.
- Which registrar your domain is with, and the login
- Which company hosts the site, and the login
- Which email address the Google Business Profile is verified under
- When the domain renews, and which card pays for it
That list is fifteen minutes of work and it is the difference between a five minute change and a three week recovery process.
If it is already tangled
Sometimes it is genuinely stuck. The developer is unreachable, the domain is in an account nobody can access, and the registrar wants documentation you do not have.
We do take these on. It usually starts with a WHOIS lookup and a few phone calls, and more often than not it turns out to be more recoverable than it looked. We do a free review first so you know what you are actually dealing with before committing to anything.
Call +1 506-801-9970 or email info@qhike.ca. We serve Fredericton, Moncton, Saint John and all of New Brunswick.