Just discovered that our website isn’t loading. I had purchased hosting through our web developer. I just looked them up, and they’re permanently closed.
Any web gurus that can help me straighten this out, would be hugely appreciated. cleanvt.com
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Got ahold of the developer. It was a dns issue. Went into godaddy and updated the nameservers about 40 minutes ago.
Holding my breath for it to take effect.
And stressing about what to do with the site longterm: managing the hosting, making updates, etc.
Hey web guy here. Still not working for me…godaddy is notoriously fast for DNS updates, 2-3 hours and nothing is a little concerning. What did you change the nameservers to/from? What did your developer say happened and his remedy?
This was his email. I didn’t take note of what the original nameservers were.
If it’s not straightened out by tomorrow morning, I’ll send him an email.
Still not working. Need to find out who he had hosting with? Most legit hosting companies may backups periodically and you can contact them. Do you not even vaguely remember what the name servers were before you changed them? At least the domain registered in your name. Godaddy should be able to tell you.
You need to see if he has a backup of the site if you don’t. Were you using Howey Web LLC? The IP address for Simplicitydns.com is a Godaddy IP so they may be able to help you.
There’s a lesson to be learned here for everyone. I always had my clients get their own hosting just to protect them in case I got run over by a truck. I would still manage them, but they always have administrative rights also and their own hosting. Lot’s of small web developers charge their clients a relatively hefty sum for hosting and then load all their sites on one hosting acct. when in reality it’s pretty cheap. For example, I just renewed mine and it was $220 ish for the year. I only have about 10 sites on it now, but could easily handle 50. So 50 websites times $50/month, which is a common hosting fee a lot of web developers charge, is $2500/mo even though only costing me $20/month.
Alex, pm me if you can’t get resolved. Typically as someone said above, GoDaddy usually extremely quick in forwarding, usually a matter of minutes.
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I’m gonna send him an email. Yes, it was Mike Howey that built and managed my site. He was always very helpful, and was pretty quick to respond yesterday.
Hosting through him was free for the first couple years, and then only $60-ish/year. But it was always a little on the slow side. Not sure if that was due to hosting, or maybe some bloated programming in his custom CMS.
After this debacle, I think I’m going back to a self-built wordpess site. It was in need of a refresh, anyway.
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The only reason for him suggesting changing the nameservers would be that he switched hosting providers. If that’s the case then either A) his nameservers are set up incorrectly or B) your site wasn’t moved to the new account or was done so incorrectly.
At the very least ask him to provide a backup. As someone else mentioned, most providers include that in the price, and any developer worth anything would keep something on file for cases like this.
Starting fresh might seem like the easy solution but any seo relevance or rankings you might have will disappear and need to start fresh as well. You can always freshen up the site but getting it back in your possession should be a priority.
I’m happy to help and even host the site moving forward in exchange for some advice as I’m new to this industry. Feel free to shoot me a pm if I can help.
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Sent him an email a little while ago. I went into godaddy and setup a redirect to our google infinitycleaning.business.site, but that causes a security warning to come up when typing in the actual cleanvt domain or clicking the url in the organic results. It doesn’t cause a security warning when clicking on the link on our google busines page, though. Pretty weird.
As far as rebuilding the site, I’m not too worried about losing SEO juice. Competition here is light, the domain is aged well, I’ve got pretty good citations, and no shortage of leads from other sources. Besides, it appears that our ranking has already dropped to the second page due to this snafu.
It’s working for me…have you looked into bluehost? I’ve never had issues with them and they’re pretty cheap. Easy to swap.
No security warnings? That would be good to hear. You’re getting this page, right? This is the new google page I’m redirecting the domain to.
I’ve heard good things about bluehost, as well.
Yeah no warnings and loaded good. I’m on my phone though not at home. I’m guessing if mobile is fine then desktop is too but could be wrong.
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Get your own hosting and make sure you buy and own your domains.
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Maybe it was a temporary glitch. I got warnings in both safari on my phone, and in firefox on my desktop.
That’s the plan 
Yes. Always have and always will 
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Ever heard of a2 hosting? I’m liking the looks of their speed-optimized wordpress hosting. I want my new page to load in a flash 
I haven’t but I’ll take a look at it. Just use bluehost and use some plugin for the backend of WordPress for page speed. Your site loaded pretty quickly for me just a minute ago. I went back to verify no warnings.
Yeah, google seems to have things optimized pretty nicely in their website builder. But it’s super generic and not very tweakable. I’d like a nice wordpress theme so it’s more customized to my liking.
I have a second site for my snow removal services, that if I moved it over to the a2 account, I could save some money. That’s currently hosted with ‘and1’ on a monthly basis
Check out divi or elemonator. Those are really cool and getting better all the time I think.
Ooh, those look slick. WYSIWIG tools have come a long way since I last delved into web design. (I remember having a bootlegged copy of DreamWeaver on my computer in highschool 
)
Not crazy about yearly fees, though. I might spring for the lifetime subscription to Divi.
After reading the fine print and some reviews, I think I’m now leaning toward Elementor. There’s no obligation to renew at the end of the year, you just don’t have access to updates or tech support. And you can start building a page in their free version and upgrade to pro later if/when needed.
Yeah they make it super easy. You’ll like it. I had dreamweaver from Napster back in the day too. It might have even been from mIRC lol. Wow how times have changed.
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