Who's Hosting This Site?

[Dave Fisher]

Hi,

We have a potential new customer looking for us to build their site using Actinic. The current site is not actinic and is an open source software built site which is functional and seems to work ok.

Now to the problem. The company that built the site moved from the uk to india and have now disappeared off the face of the earth and all phone and fax lines have been cut.

We need to try and find out it the current site is a ticking time bomb and when and if it will explode. We assume the company that will remain nameless have a reseller account with someone which will expire when it's annual renewal is due and therefore all sites within this reseller account will cease to function.

The company who will remain nameless have their own named servers and I have done a trace on the IP address and think (by using dnsstuff.com) the site is hosted in Dallas, Texas.

Is there anyway of finding out the name of the company that is hosting the site?

Hope this is possible and some tekkie person out there has the answer!

Many thanks for reading this long post.

Regards,

Dave

[chris ashdown]

why be shy, name the company and let everyone know, some other customers may not be aware of the potential problems

[Dave Fisher]

Chris,

I am not being shy but thought it was not ethical to
a) Name the open source package (although the moderator will remove it)
b) Name the company involved

Dave

[Mark H]

I think if the company has made insufficient effort to look after their clients' interests you should have no problem in naming them - again, this might help your client and others to resolve the situation.

[Dave Fisher]

The company is called Dovemex Solutions

[dave_finlayson]

Is it a .co.uk domain?

If so you could try doing a whois search on their website (http://www.nominet.org.uk/). It should tell you who owns the domain and with any luck the names of the nameservers will tell give you a clue to who is hosting it.

[jont]

If you do the WHOIS look up on dnsstuff.com and look for the Registrants Agent and the "TAG" will let you know the hosts

[RuralWeb]

Whats the url of the site that is having the problem. Its no good looking at the companies hosting as it may be different.

[Dave Fisher]

Jonty,

Already done the whois and it says FASTHOSTS

Have contacted Fasthosts and they say the site is not hosted by them and just registered with them. I have taced the dns & ip addresses as follows
ns2.dovemexdns.com 69.93.194.149
ns1.dovemexdns.com 69.93.194.148

As mentioned previously tracing the IP takes us to Dallas, Texas

Regards,

Dave

[RuralWeb]

I dont know what your plan is when you find out who the site is hosted with but I would get the Actinic site up and running ASP. If the domains are registered with Fasthosts then at least you can get at them and setup some other hosting.

[Dave Fisher]

Malcolm,

I totally agree with your comments about getting it up and running asap. We were just trying to find out how long we have to build the new site before the existing one ceases to be there !

Regards,

Dave

[RuralWeb]

I would not bother - if you find the host they are unlikely to tell you without you knowing the passwords etc. Whatever happens it will take the same ammount of time to build a new site so I would spend it cutting and pasting before the site does go down.

[los_design]

I take it the site owner has full ftp access etc?

If so, begin developing and get them to 'grab' the current site (os or zen whatever they are using), extract the useful info (such as products etc), back it up, and transfer out of the current set up with fasthost using nominet (if .co.uk)

You can quite easily set up a new temp domain for them using their current business name and redirect the 'old site' to the new location (302 it) with the grabbed content in place until your www.theirdomain.co.uk/newsite/ goes live.

Thus grabbing complete control. The key is, do they have access via ftp to the html docs and mysql info? (they must have a username and password for the account?)

HTH

[completerookie]

Go and get HTTRACK as soon as possible (www.httrack.com) .
then download the site to YOUR hard disk. do this NOW and you can then start working on the replacement WITHOUT the fear of it suddenly dissapearing.
as soon as you have downloaded the site, make a bacup on CD as well.
You may need to change the options to allow "CGI following" or you will not get a FULL site.

[Dave Fisher]

Dovemex sold the solutions as they would sort everything out hence the domain name is registered to them. Also the did not give any access via ftp or control panel so the customer was not able to upload etc

Think you are all right and we will just get on the building the site.

Thanks for the info on httack and will check it out.

Thanks to everyone that has contributed to this thread.