Can somebody else take over my website?

People ask this apologetically, as if the site being somebody else’s work makes it awkward. It doesn’t. Most of the websites I look after were written by somebody I have never spoken to, and taking one over is ordinary work rather than a favour.

What is awkward is the bit underneath the question, which is usually one of two things. Either the person who built it has stopped answering emails, or they are still answering and the client does not want to say why they are leaving. Neither of those is my business. What I do need is access, and that is where these conversations actually get stuck.

Three things, and you probably hold one of them

A website is not one asset. It is three, and they can sit in three different places with three different people.

The domain is the name. It lives at a registrar, and whoever controls the account controls where the name points, which means they control the website and the email regardless of who wrote the code.

The hosting is the machine the files sit on. Sometimes it is a shared account at a company you have heard of, sometimes it is a folder on a server belonging to the agency that built it, alongside eleven other clients.

The code is the site itself. Files and a database, which is the part people picture when they say “my website”, and the part that matters least in an argument.

Before I take anything on I need either real access to all three, or a full copy of the second and third plus a route to the first. Not a screenshot of a dashboard. Not a promise that the old developer will hand it over next week.

What happens when the old developer will not answer

More often than people expect, and there is a boring path through it.

If the domain is registered in your business name, the registrar will let you recover the account through their own process. It is slow and it involves proving who you are, and it works. If it is registered in the developer’s name, that is a different and much worse conversation, and it is worth finding out which one you are in before anything else.

For the site itself, an unanswered developer is annoying rather than fatal. If I can get at the hosting I can take a copy. If I cannot get at the hosting either, we are rebuilding, and I will say so early rather than let you pay me to chase somebody for six weeks.

The first week is reading

I do not change anything on day one. The first pass is finding out what is actually there, which on an inherited site takes longer than the fixing does.

What version of whatever it runs, and when it was last updated. Whether the backups exist, and separately whether they contain the database, because I have seen a backup set where every job succeeded every night and the largest database on the box had never been in any of them. What the certificate does when nobody is watching it. Whether the server is running anything else, which on a shared box it usually is, and what state that thing is in.

I also check whether the running configuration matches the files on disk, because on an inherited server they have never once matched.

Then you get a short document saying what I found and what I would change. If you read it and decide to keep the site where it is, that is a legitimate outcome and you have lost nothing.

When I tell you it is not worth keeping

Sometimes the honest answer is that maintaining it is money into a hole.

A platform version with no security updates still being published. A commercial theme whose author has disappeared, so every update breaks something and nobody can fix it. A site somebody wrote from scratch in 2014, no framework, no version control, and a database schema only the author ever understood. In those cases paying somebody monthly to apply updates that cannot be applied is worse than doing nothing, because it feels like cover and isn’t.

I would rather lose the monthly fee than take it for eighteen months and then tell you the thing needs replacing anyway. That is not generosity. It is that the alternative ends with an angry phone call and a rebuild you resent paying for.

What actually breaks during a move

If we do move it, the failures are almost always the same four.

Email. A domain’s mail records live next to its web records, and a careless move takes the mail with the site. This is the one that causes real damage, because a website being down for an hour is embarrassing and email being down for a day is expensive. I change web records and leave mail records alone unless moving them is the job.

Absolute URLs baked into the database, so the new site quietly loads images from the old server and looks fine right up until the old server is switched off.

Scheduled jobs nobody mentioned. A nightly export, a feed that updates prices, a script that emails somebody a report every Monday. These are invisible in the files and they stop the moment the machine changes.

And DNS timing. Records carry a cache lifetime, and if it is set to a day then a portion of the internet keeps going to the old address for a day. Dropping that value a few days before the move costs nothing and removes the whole problem, which is why I do it first and move second.

What it costs, and what it does not include

The care plan is £49 a month. No minimum term, a month’s notice either way, and it does not matter whether I wrote the site. That covers hosting on a server I run myself, the certificate, daily off-site backups that get restored to check them, updates applied and verified, uptime monitoring, and up to an hour of content changes a month.

Reading your site and telling you what state it is in happens before any of that, and before you have committed to anything.

What it is not: new features, a redesign, or somebody available at three in the morning. I am one person with an alert on my phone. If your website going down at 4am costs you money by the hour, you want a managed hosting provider with staff on shift, and I will tell you that rather than take the money.

If you are thinking about it

Find out whose name the domain is registered in. Today, before anything else, because it is the one answer that changes what is possible, and it is the one nobody checks until they need it.

Then send me the address. I will tell you what it is running, whether the backups are real, and whether it is worth keeping, and none of that costs anything.