I am an officer in a car club, Up until a few of years ago, we had a club website. Our webmaster, an IT guy, handled the entire website from set up to adding new information. He died. Our Club Treasurer paid the set up fees and any ongoing charges for the site, she died. The site is still up and is accessible but we are unable add info. We do not know the name of the website provider and there is no info on the website itself.
We are in the process of setting up a new website after doing without for 2 or 3 years. I would like to use the the same website name for the new site. The problem I anticipate is that when someone searches for our club they may get the old site.
I would like to either kill the old site or make sure that when someone searches they get the new site. The only thing I can think of is to get our membership to search multiple times to get a lot of hits on the new site. Will that get the new site first in line of the listings. If not, is there another way to do this.
If you do a who is lookup on the whebsite You will probably get the name of the company that registared the domain. That will probably be the people who are hosting it.
Trying to push your new site above the old one in search listings is going to be very difficult. Tracking down the hosting company for the old site and either updating the site there or taking over the domain name registration will be a lot easier. Start with the WHOIS lookup gazpacho linked to.
If you need help past what **gazpacho **linked to, send me a PM. I can try to help you track down the registrar and the host. Your best plan of action is to get control of the domain name and change the DNS to point to your new site.
Are you sure you want to take over the website? Do you remember what happened to the last two who tried…?
Seriously, though, look up gazpacho’s link, find the domain registrar, and explain to them what happened. Preferably have a copy of the death certificate and any necessary corporate/organizational paperwork (as official as you can make it look). They might be willing to transfer it over, if not now, then at least when it’s set to expire…
Here is the rest of the story - we have not gotten a bill or paid for the website in 2 or 3 years. All of the club contact info on the website is out of date so the website hosts would not be able to contact us. We can get a free simple to use website for car clubs from Hemmings Motor News and they will help us with everything associated with it. so that is the way we want to go.
I appreciate the offers of help and help with locating the hosts. I will see what happens with my limited skills and knowledge of IT. I am more of a Commodore C64 type guy. I am also thinking about slightly changing the name of the website so at least if someone searches the new name they will get the new website.
tks again - all of you dope people are pretty cool
I would make a reasonable effort to reclaim the web site name, because if you don’t, then someone else might claim it. And then they could put up material under that name that may reflect very poorly on your organization.
Note that hosting the website (i.e., storing all the data and delivering it to the customer’s browser) is different from registering the URL (i.e., the “address book” that looks up which server hosts the website data the customer is looking for when they click on the URL); if you can find out which registry holds the URL, and convince them that your company actually owns it, you can then point the URL to whatever host server you like. The old site data won’t have any pointers to it, so it will just die alone and lonely. Many registrars also do hosting, so right now both services may be through the same company, but they can’t require you to host through them even if they are the registrar.
It’s theoretically possible the registrar might have gone kaput; there is supposed to be an organized handoff of domains to a different registrar if one goes under, but if the company hasn’t quite expired that may not have happened yet. But the situation shouldn’t result in a “no domain” error.
However, the question I have is, did the IT guy register the domain in his/her name? That will pose some complications if he/she did and has passed. As you’ll have to provide a death certificate and proof that you wanted him/her to register the domain in your car club interests. You should also act quickly as you don’t want the domain to expire and then have a domain squatter pick it up and then sell it to you for $1000 or something silly.
Domain name. The root of the name used to name the site. This is the name that you register and pay for. All these names eventually expire, and so you need to pay to keep them alive. Once they die you will not be able to see anything with the name. Registration of the name includes the registering service providing a pointer to your hosting service, wherever that may be. It is this pointer that allows anyone on the Internet to type in the registered name and get directed to your site.
Hosting - the place where the web site is served from. This can be anywhere, and can be moved independently of the site name, and is independent of the registrant of the site’s name. You probably pay for this as well.
The only thing you need to do is to regain control of you domain name. The hosting service can be ignored and allowed to lapse and die.
As noted above, the only name registerd is the root name of the domain. This can be a tiny bit tricky, and it would be useful to know exactly what the domain name you have is. Anything after a / in a URL (including the /) is not part of the domain name. Anything before two slashes is also not part of the domain nae (including the //). Complicating matters, not everything at the start of a URL is part of the domain name either. When you go to boards.straightdope.com the domain name is straightdope.com, and that points to the hosting server. Internal to the server it sees the “boards” prefix and uses that to decide to send the request to the BB service instead of the main web page server. However, just from inspection you won’t know this.
As decribed above, find the domain name registrar for the domain name, recover control of the name, and you are done. All you then have to do is point it at your new hosting service. You can move the registration to another registrar service if you want, although this takes a bit of faffing about.
This is an all too common problem with small clubs and associations. For very good reasons resistrars are very loath to turn over control of a registered domain to someone else. You need to keep all the information centrally, ensure that it is in the hands of a club officer and part of the kit of stuff that gets passed from officer to officer, and never just left with someone who volunteers to sort it all out.
I would recommend trying to reclaim the old domain. You can find out who has it registered using WHOIS. Then look at the Name Servers and that would indicate where it is being hosted.
You can have a domain hosted anywhere, but who it is registered to is important because that’s who controls the domain and can point it to a new web hosting service.
If you have not archived the content from the current or old website, you can do so using the Wayback machine to retrieve content from the past and if it is not longer being hosted.
If the domain is still registered, and it isn’t actually being used for anything else, you can do a back order to try to buy the domain.
Once you have decided on exactly on what your objective is here, people can better direct you.