Hello,

I don't want to make this lengthy, due to my lack of technical knowledge it is destined to be a short story in any case.

Many years ago - Good friends with a website designer/developer who purchased my domain name (presumably registering it in my details) and built my website.

A few years ago - Fell out with said 'professional' due to personal reasons but he continued to host all of my domains and websites, as this was easier than regaining contact and transferring everything over to myself when I am not overly technical in knowing what to do.

A few months ago - Received an outrageous invoice for domain renewals and other services we never asked for with massively inflated costs. We ignored the invoice without making payment. He never chased it up presumably due to our lack of communication with our ended relationship being on bad terms.

Now - Person in question claims he is no longer working on websites and is shutting down his servers in the next couple of days that our domain, website and email addresses are hosted on.

We have created a new website and email address under a different domain as we simply can't operate without this, and exported all of our emails into .mbox files to put on the new server. Of course, we will lose any google rankings etc built up over the past 2 decades but that is collateral damage. 

My question is - Once he closes down these servers and hosting accounts, what happens to my domain? He will not transfer it to us. Is it lost in the abyss? So far as I'm aware it still has at least a year until it needs renewing. We will continue to operate as usual under the new domain and get over the transition period, but it would certainly be nice to have our #1 domain choice in our own hands down the line.

Any advice is appreciated!

If the original domain name was registered in your name then you should be able to regain control of that.

The website itself may be lost forever if he is not willing to transfer it over to your new hosting. What you could do is visit each page in turn and save it locally - at least that way you will have the content and images. With a bit of work you should be able to rebuild the site and keep all your ranking.

Without seeing the website and the registration information it's a bit difficult to help more.

3 minutes ago, fisicx said:

If the original domain name was registered in your name then you should be able to regain control of that.

The website itself may be lost forever if he is not willing to transfer it over to your new hosting. What you could do is visit each page in turn and save it locally - at least that way you will have the content and images. With a bit of work you should be able to rebuild the site and keep all your ranking.

Without seeing the website and the registration information it's a bit difficult to help more.

Thanks a lot for your response.

I'm not fussed about keeping the website, it was very outdated in any case and it is a local service based business with a full diary for the next 2 months, so losing the Google ranking won't affect us in the grand scheme of things.

If I am the registered owner of the domain, do you know how would I go about regaining control? The domain was set up with privacy so there is no information on Who Is to prove whether he input my details as the owner or not, but at the time we were friends so I assume this would be the case.

Thanks again.

Edited December 31, 20187 yr by Noob

Use a whois service to find out where the domain is registered. You then contact the registrar and get a login to your control panel. You can then set up redirects from the old site to new - this will help retain all your ranking.

If you need help with this let me know - no charge for the service as it's a simple thing to do once you know how to do it.