Are you prepared if your hosting company is suddenly out of business?
I am hoping this is not a continuing trend. Over the summer we were getting a few of these calls. Maybe once per month. Last week I had 3 calls within a couple of business days. Some of this may be due to the Amazon outage. But the problem is the same. What do you do when your website goes down because the company hosting it has gone out of business?
Here is how the call goes. The business owner finds out their website is down. They call their website contact. The phone number is either going to voicemail or has a message it is out of service. They try emailing. The emails bounced back. They try every contact they have and can’t get a hold of them. Google says the business is permanently closed. Meanwhile, the website is still down.
They call Cybervise desperate for help. This is a big investment suddenly gone. We walk through the situation with them. But once the site is totally dark, an immediate rescue is hard to do. Maybe their vendor might have a backup to send them? But if the server is shut down, they can’t access the files either. Doesn’t matter how many backups they took. The website is gone.
All the Website Down Calls Had One Thing in Common
Every one of these people I have talked to in 2025 had one thing in common. They had recently hired someone to build them a website. Once the site went live, they let the web developer host it for them on the developer’s system. Now the developer is not taking calls. Probably stopped paying the bill for their server space. They did not give the client access to the service space. (Which is easy to do if the service is legit.) The backups all went to the developers’ system. In some cases the developer also took over the registration of the domain name. Which means they now own it. The business owner gave full control to the web developer.
I spoke with a business owner from California last week with a website down. Her site was gone, the phone number she had for her developer was disconnected. Google was saying the developer’s business was permanently closed. She still had her GoDaddy login. When she logged in, the domain was also gone. The developer had transferred the registration of her domain to their account. Everything was gone. She was already working with an attorney, but that was going to take time. People used her website to schedule appointments with her company. Every day it was down she was losing business. But because of the situation, rescuing what she had was not possible.
Your website is a major investment. You need to protect it. Just like you would any other business asset. Is your company website your responsibility? Don’t delegate this off to a contractor. Take control while you still can.
Regain Control – Prepare to Recover Your Website
Disaster recovery is part of business. Having your hosting company go out of business is definitely a disaster. There are a couple of things you can do today to prevent a total disaster.
Keep Your Domain With You.
Your Domain Name is a major business asset. Once lost, its not easy to get back. Having to start over with a new domain name is literally starting over. Keep your Domain Name info as protected as you would the login to your bank account.
Many website owners share their domain login with a vendor to help get work done. When you do, make it clear that you are not handing over ownership. Once the vendor is done, reset the password. Then if they need access again they have to come back and ask.
I want to be clear. Your domain name and your web hosting DO NOT NEED TO BE THE SAME COMPANY. If someone tells you you have to transfer your domain registration for them to host your website. This is a lie! You can point your domain to whatever servers or DNS they need. You can add them as one of the contacts, not all. Your hosting company does not need to register or own your domain name. Once you agree to this, they own it. There is nothing you can do to get it back if they go out of business and you can’t get a hold of them.
How Can I Check on my Domain Name today?
Here is a list of key pieces of information that you should know to maintain control of your Domain Name.
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- Do you know where the domain was registered? If you know the company where the domain name should be, no one can scam you out of it.
- Who is the contact on the domain registration? Who gets emailed when the registration needs to be renewed.
If you can’t answer these questions, try to do a WHOIS lookup. This will show you the public record of your domain and help you find it. (Not sure what you are looking at? Call us.) - Find the login. If you know where it was registered and who gets the emails from the account, you can get an updated login.
- Login and take a look at your account. Do you see your domain listed as a purchased product? When does it renew? What card is the renewal billed to?
You have the login for the domain registration. The registration has someone who currently works at your business as a contact. The bill is going to your company and you are paying for it. If all this is true. Your domain is safe and in your control.
Keep a Backup on a Local Drive
The second task is a little trickier and depends on what kind of website you have. The goal is to have something to work with in case you need to launch your website somewhere else. If you currently have the ability to login to your website and make updates, you have a chance to do this.
WordPress site owners – This is easy if you have an Administrator login to your site. If someone has setup a backup plugin on the site, usually you can use it to download a zip file with your site files. Keep a copy of that zip file on a local network. Or maybe a Dropbox or SharePoint drive? Put a note on your calendar to pull down a new zip file every so many months. How often is up to you. That zip file could help recover your website within hours, not months.
If you don’t have a WordPress site, start checking on how to do a backup of the site. For example, do a search in Google on “how do I store an external backup of my Wix site”? Anything you can pull down and save in a place you know is something that could be used to rebuild the site if needed.
When you are in a situation where your developer is your host and access is limited. Get a backup copy now while the relationship is still good. If your request meets resistance, try this. Tell them you are working on an “industry compliance audit”. You have to show a backup copy of your website files. If you have an IT department or IT consultant, get them in on it. See if they can make an “official” request. If this works, you have opened the door to asking again in 6 months or a year when you need to “renew”. Now you have a copy of your site and can take control if the worst happens.
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