question Old website recover

[vrnetz]

Hello,

My father used to have a hobby which he build a website off. The thing is that the provider has went bankrupt or been taken over by another company. The website is still online but shows up like:

www.members.(provider).com/(hisname)

I try to get control out of it, contacted the new company but they say they can't find information. But it's still online for years already. Anyone has a solution? I would be really thankfull since he enjoyed it so much.

Many thanks in advance!

 

[Peak.Domains]

It might be worth asking the company who owns the rights to the content or looking at their terms of service.

If their terms of service don't give them ownership of content published by their users, you could save the content and re-create a new site, since it's your father's content.

The issue here is if Google gives preferential treatment to the original site with the content instead of the new site you might not get many visitors from search, but if you plan to continue adding to the site, it could be possible to overcome that with that. Also, if you took the original content and added onto it, edited it a bit, re-wrote some parts, improved it, that could help a lot.

Maybe you can find a nice domain for him and setup something like WordPress, and work on porting over the old content and showing him how to add new posts etc with WP.

 

[BrandPlease]

IF you are trying to get the content, and the site is able to be found on Archive.org - I can help you extract all the content - pretty easily. So, check Archive & if you can find a version with the content, send me a direct message.

 

[poweredbyme]

I try to get control out of it, contacted the new company but they say they can't find information. But it's still online for years already. Anyone has a solution? I would be really thankfull since he enjoyed it so much.

Many thanks in advance!

If you don't have a backup of the site in your hand or in your server/hosting, the chances are almost nil, unfortunately. But if it's a super important site for you, then watch 404 errors in order to know which internal pages and static resources (images, videos, etc) are lost. Then reinstate those lost pages and static resources. Also try to find if the website has a sitemap. If you don't have an idea what those mean, hire an expert. I can help for a fee. You will need to host the site on my own dedicated server. Because I will manually watch server logs in order to find out everything that has been lost. I can no do it properly on the servers that I don't control. Once I think the site is reinstated enough (full reinstatement is impossible) you can move your website to your own hosting. PM me if you are interested with your budget and website address. I estimate the whole process will take 6+ months depending on site structure, content, etc.