July 15, 201115 yr Hi guys, My first post here, and I must admit, a little out of desperation... My situation: Last year I commissioned someone (freelance) to develop a website for me. I paid an 'All inclusive' fee which meant the hosting etc was all sorted by the developer. Subsequently, the hosting has now expired and therefore my website is down. Unfortunately I didn't get the Website on Disc from the developer... I didn't think to ask... I've been unable to get hold of the developer to explain the website is down, despite numerous voicemails and emails. The hosting company won't renew the hosting as it's "not my account". So am I up the creak....?! Are there any other avenues I can follow? All help much appreciated!!
July 15, 201115 yr Hi guys, My first post here, and I must admit, a little out of desperation... My situation: Last year I commissioned someone (freelance) to develop a website for me. I paid an 'All inclusive' fee which meant the hosting etc was all sorted by the developer. Subsequently, the hosting has now expired and therefore my website is down. Unfortunately I didn't get the Website on Disc from the developer... I didn't think to ask... I've been unable to get hold of the developer to explain the website is down, despite numerous voicemails and emails. The hosting company won't renew the hosting as it's "not my account". So am I up the creak....?! Are there any other avenues I can follow? All help much appreciated!! It's really unfortunate that I see so many of these stories. Do you have control of the domain name? If not and if it's in the developers name, it's going to be very difficult to gain control of. If it were just static content on the website, you may be able to retrieve the content from some web caches - but you'd be very lucky if this were the case. If you do have control of the domain name, you should be able to order web hosting elsewhere and point the domain to your hosting account, but the original website content wont be there. Good luck
July 15, 201115 yr Author Yes I own / have details of the domain. I guess worse case would be to get new hosting and have to create the website all over again. But naturally I'm trying to avoid that... So there isn't any other way? Edited July 15, 201115 yr by AM4U
July 15, 201115 yr Yes I own / have details of the domain. I guess worse case would be to get new hosting and have to do create the website all over again. But naturally I'm trying to avoid that... So there isn't any other way? Take a look on http://wayback.archive.org/web/ - they may have a cache of the content. If not, check Google. But yes, ordering new hosting would be the worst-case scenario, but this may be the only option. Make sure to order hosting in your name so if the developer vanishes, you are still able to control the account.
July 15, 201115 yr Author Sigh... seems like a silly mistake now... but who had thought after doing all the hard work, being paid etc, he would disappear?!
July 15, 201115 yr Sigh... seems like a silly mistake now... but who had thought after doing all the hard work, being paid etc, he would disappear?! I don't quite understand it, but there is an awful lot of web designers who do this, and it really isn't acceptable. I've seen this occur far too often.
July 15, 201115 yr You can easily get a copy of the entire website simply from the browser E.g. by what you see. If you PM me the website address I do this for you - have a nifty little program I found about 5 years ago that works great does it work even when the site has now been taken down? guessing not
July 15, 201115 yr does it work even when the site has now been taken down? guessing not No it doesn't
July 15, 201115 yr Sigh... seems like a silly mistake now... but who had thought after doing all the hard work, being paid etc, he would disappear?! Sadly, this happens a LOT where people pay the designer to host their website, and I mean no offence to designers here, but designers generally know nothing about hosting, they simply buy a reseller account with a bigger host, and this always puts the customer in a really bad position, such as the one your in now, only it seems its often the case that some designers vanish long before the hosting runs out, all-be-it on holiday, hospital or just get busy with their day-jobs, leaving a client with no access to take a copy of their site and nobody to contact because the designer sub-let the hosting space... The absolute best thing any customer can do is to always buy their own web hosting space and domain name then provide the logins to the designer, that way, they are delivering your website, to you, not to themselves in a place you can see it..... Whats even worse is, a lot of hosts that sell reseller hosting, sell it as "White label", meaning the end customr has even less chance of figuring out who the real host is... It is a pain in the rear, and a reason we refuse to offer unlabelled hosting, because if any of our resellers ever "vanish", we want to makew sure their clients are not left hung out to dry.. If you want proper hosting, get it from a hosting provider, but try to keep your hosting independant of the designer/developer, no matter how much they try to tell you they have a setup already that works, they build for their own servers or whatever, a good designer is exactly that, a good "designer" and will be happy with whatever arrangements you want to make for yourself, possibly offering some advice along the way. Oh, and if ANY designer/Developer ever says you need to transfer your name to them, run for the hills and find somebody else. No designer/developer ever needs your domain name at all, keep that with your hosting company. Just some advice based on years of experience and listening to upset customers looking for help :-) Edited July 15, 201115 yr by wesh.co.uk
July 15, 201115 yr Is the site down because the year is up? Ask the host for a backup? Anything could have happened to that guy, family problems, on holiday anything... Edited July 15, 201115 yr by pandadoodle
August 3, 201115 yr Author Hi Guys, Sorry I hadn't checked the thread for updates. Rallport, you have PM wesh.co.uk, thanks very much for your advice, and for your Jst hosting! The build for this site has been a painful road for me. I initially hired someone freelance, paid a deposit and I found myself having to provide ALL of the creative input rather than direction. So I decided to cut my losses and move on. I then hired a local "company" because I thought it would be good to meet up and thrash out creatives instead doing everything by email... the initial stage took 6 months so I got the feeling my site was very low on their priority list. I was never given the chance to meet and realised it was probably a one man band working out of his shed... not that there is anything wrong with that, but that's not what it said on the tin. So again I decided it wasn't working. By now I was out of pocket and with nothing I could use... Finally I found someone I could use as a sounding board and he seemed to be giving me all the right answers. The build was relatively painless - but only because I created some crude mocks of all the pages using word and paint. The site was build and worked fine until now... The domain is in my name and I wish I'd just bought the hosting but you live and learn. I initially wanted to have a go at building my site myself and only commissioned someone because I couldn't find the time needed to learn and work on the site myself.
August 3, 201115 yr Author I may be making some progress. I've trawled through some old emails and have managed to find some FTP details (I'm not fully really sure what these are but I understand them to be the host server details?). I managed to log into the control panel and have set up a backup. Will this allow me to buy a hosting package and point my site to the new host? Edited August 3, 201115 yr by AM4U
August 3, 201115 yr Author I have done that and have a ".tar.gz" file. Is this what I need? It says it's a "full backup"
August 3, 201115 yr If it's labelled as a full backup, it probably means it contains all the files out of your web folder plus a .sql file for each database. If so, that's all you'll need. tar.gz is a Linux archive, which has been compressed twice with two separate algorithms. If you're on Windows you'll be able to extract it with 7-Zip. Edited August 3, 201115 yr by Renaissance-Design
August 3, 201115 yr I have done that and have a ".tar.gz" file. Is this what I need? It says it's a "full backup" Usually, yes. Do you know what control panel it was? Depending which control panel it was, you may need to take a Database backup separately.
August 3, 201115 yr Cpanel? Yes, a full cPanel backup will contain everything, including e-mails and accounts. This can be restored very easily at nearly every cPanel web hosting company.
August 3, 201115 yr Author Is there anyway of me checking the file I have is the website before purchasing hosting?
August 3, 201115 yr Is there anyway of me checking the file I have is the website before purchasing hosting? You should be able to extract the file using some Extraction Software (I presume it's tar.gz? Try 7zip, that should extract it). The files will be inside somewhere.
August 3, 201115 yr Yup, that's everything you need. You'll be able to import that file directly into another CPanel setup (check with your new host before buying) or if necessary set up the site manually using the files.
August 4, 201115 yr Author Okay, made some progress last night. To cut a long story short, I managed to locate and persuade the guy I purchased the hosting from to take a look at what might be wrong. he suggested it wasn't the hosting as although it has run out, they hadn't switched it off (so to speak). Apparently there were some corrupt files which have been sorted. Naturally I don't want to be in the same position again and therefore want to move my hosting so I have full control of it. I purchased the domain from 123reg and am thinking I'm thinking of getting the hosting from them too... Before I do, I have a few questions; 1) Should I be looking at getting pointing the website at the new hosting (if so, how is that done?) or be taking a full copy of the site and then uploading it? 2) Will the new hosting provide a new cPanel (or equivalent)? 3) Should the hosting provide some sort of back up/ security? Really appreciate all the help and input so far! As you can probably get I'm a complete novice but learning an important lesson!
August 4, 201115 yr Okay, made some progress last night. To cut a long story short, I managed to locate and persuade the guy I purchased the hosting from to take a look at what might be wrong. he suggested it wasn't the hosting as although it has run out, they hadn't switched it off (so to speak). Apparently there were some corrupt files which have been sorted. Naturally I don't want to be in the same position again and therefore want to move my hosting so I have full control of it. I purchased the domain from 123reg and am thinking I'm thinking of getting the hosting from them too... Before I do, I have a few questions; 1) Should I be looking at getting pointing the website at the new hosting (if so, how is that done?) or be taking a full copy of the site and then uploading it? 2) Will the new hosting provide a new cPanel (or equivalent)? 3) Should the hosting provide some sort of back up/ security? Really appreciate all the help and input so far! As you can probably get I'm a complete novice but learning an important lesson! Glad to see you're finally getting things sorted. Personally, if you want my advice, do a bit of research before you jump into another hosting package. Take a look around for some reviews of hosting companies, generally, these forums are quite a good place for that. I personally haven't seen any 123-reg hosting services, so can't advise you on what you'll be getting, but from a guess at the type of company they are, it'll be very unlikely they'll be offering cPanel, they'll probably have their own control panel. If this is the case, you will not be able to automatically have your backup restored and will manually have to extract the information from the .tar.gz backup you made inside cPanel. Finally, yes. It's very important to find a web host who will offer you backups. It'll save you a lot of time and you can rest assured your data is safe should it need restoring at any point.
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