Hi all,
I am new here but I have a question hopefully someone can help me with... I am a freelance designer and recently took on a new job. Their company hired a firm out of town to design their website... Here is the trouble: that company took care of all their hosting duties and now they are out of business. The client does not know what web hosting provider they were signed up on... Is there any way to find out who they are signed up with? Any help would be greatly appreciated... Clients url below...

http://www.kubhomes.com/

Is it HTML problem?

I is not an html problem. Here existing site http://www.kubhomes.com/ . The problem is she hired a company out of town to design it. I trying to figure out what web hosting company they uploaded the files too. They took care of everything. She does not even get a bill from a hosting company.

Adam there's a relatively easy way to find out. You want to do a whois search. The link should take you to one for the site. There are a few Firefox plugins that let you do this easily. I use the search status plugin.

Looks like Kub Homes is hosted by GoDaddy. (When you see domaincontrol listed as nameserver it's GoDaddy) Unfortunately the registration details are private so you can't see who the domain is registered to. Hopefully it's your client, but I've seen cases where a web designer or firm registers the domain under their own name, meaning they own the domain as well.

The domain was registered at GoDaddy as well. See if your client has login info for GoDaddy. If they do then you should be able to take care of the hosting by logging in. If not you'll need to call GoDaddy, though be prepared for your client not being the owners of the domain.

Thanks vangogh. This will at least give her a starting point. I guess if she does not own the domain name, she can buy a different one.

I have one more question.... GoDaddy is where they bought the domain name... That doesn't mean the GoDaddy is their Web Host??

I ask because... Am I going to run into a problem because when I try to upload a new site onto a new web hosting site when the old site is still up?

Your site doesn't have to be hosted at the same place where you registered it, but in this case the site is hosted at GoDaddy.

If you have a GoDaddy login check to see if the domain is listed there. If so then your client owns it and you can change the registration info.

If you want to move a site from one host to another what you want to do is first build the new site on the new host. You'll set up the hosting account with the domain you want to use, but you'll be able to access the site through the IP address or through a URL the hosting company gives you. That allows you to keep the old site up and running while you build the new one.

Once the new site is ready you want to change the nameservers at the registrar where the domain was registered to point to the new hosting account. When you see that the new site is now the live one associated with the domain you can cancel the old hosting account. You can tell the new site is the live one, but checking the IP address it's being served from or making a minor change to a page and observing that minor change showing up on the site.

Just for reference, you can also plug the domain into whoishostingthis.com and it'll tell you where it's hosted. I've tried this before when the WhoIs won't tell you.