A friend of mine recently purchased a business – a nail shop. Not being really tech savvy, she didn’t think to have the contract with the web site’s host transferred into her name, or even get the password so she could update it herself. She’s working on contacting the previous owner to get this taken care of, but so far hasn’t been able to. Meanwhile, the web site misrepresents her price list, and more importantly states that each customer will be served a glass of wine, which is actually illegal where the shop is. Assuming she can never get a hold of the old owner, can she get the site taken down by contacting the hosting service, or will she need to involve a lawyer?
I don’t know what happens if she can’t ever contact the owner. A lawyer would probably be needed to force the ISP to take the site down.
However, it may be a lot simpler than that. Did she look at the Whois registration information for the site? That should tell her who she needs to contact provided it is up to date. Just type in the domain name in the search box and scroll down. It will give the owner and the contacts at the ISP. The former shop owner may not be the actual owner of the domain if she hired someone to build it for her.
If this was causing loss of business I’d be considering suing the solicitor who handled the sale on behalf of the buyer, he really should have sorted this out for the buyer.
Another thing to look for in the WHOIS data is when the domain registration expires. If it’s soon, just let it expire and then register a new domain and create a new site.
No respectable hosting company or registrar will hand over the keys to a site, even in circumstances like these.
I’d suggest creating a new web site, with a new address, and advertising that. If and when she gets control of the domain name, redirect it to the new site.
That also has the advantage of taking the web hosting account out of the picture. If she has her own site, the domain name is the only old thing she needs.
At some point the old domain registration will expire. That could be days or years from now. Your friend could use a service like Snapnames.com to try to buy it when it does expire.
A good web site developer should be able to help her with all of this.