This morning I got a frantic e-mail from one of the officers at our local animal rescue: The website is gone!
Upon investigation I found that their web host no longer exists. It’s been gone since sometime around the end of last month. According to news reports, no one knows why. There’s a sign in the window that says “Closed,” and they’re not answering any calls or emails.
They may be a victim of the economic downturn – perhaps too many customers couldn’t pay their bills. Or perhaps they had some kind of personal health or financial crisis. Whatever the reason, they’re not there and their customers are out of luck.
I was further surprised when I went to Who Is and learned that I’m still the contact person and admin for that domain name, even though I haven’t been with the group for several years. I thought I had changed that…
But they’re lucky, because I’m still here and willing to do the work to change it.
Hopefully the web designer who re-built their site a couple of years ago has kept everything in his own computer, because they’re going to have to start all over.
Another customer I wrote for had bad luck with that one. Their web designer had used some kind of on-line service and NONE of their web pages were stored in his computer. When that host went away they had to start all over from the beginning.
Another danger of using small hosts lies in professionalism – or lack of it.
A friend of mine had her site with a local host who had also done her web design. And they refused to make corrections! This is not so good when one of the mistakes is an incorrect phone number.
Since they refused to fix the errors she asked me to do it, but they had control of her site and refused to give her the user name and password to get in. The whole thing made no sense, since the corrections might have taken all of 10 minutes.
She decided to discontinue their service, but with no copies of her web pages where she could get to them, we had to “steal” her pages one piece at a time and reconstruct them. The words were pretty easy, but the swirly graphics were in many pieces – putting them back together was a trick!
The next hurdle came when she tried to switch hosts – because her name wasn’t listed in the Who Is information. A computer-savvy employee had set it all up and used his own name as contact person and admin. Unfortunately, he had passed away, so my friend went through weeks of sending proof that she had a right to move that domain.
The lesson: Host with the big guys – and always, always, always list your own name as owner of your domain.
If someone else built your site and you aren’t sure, just go to www.whois.com, click on "look up" and type in your URL – you’ll find out where you stand.
If you find you aren’t there, contact your web person and have him or her go make the change. Don’t wait until they’ve moved away, gotten mad at you for some reason, or (perish the thought) passed away.
One last thing: No matter where your website is hosted or how much you love or trust the person who maintains your site – keep current HTML copies of your web pages in your own computer and in your back up files.
Having those pages readily available could save you weeks of grief.
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