We were contacted by a panicked gentleman who was looking for some help. His primary domain name was about to expire. The company he had been using for his hosting wasn’t responding his requests for renewal. As we began investigating, the situation looked bad. It turned out that the company was operated by a sole proprietor. The main domain name for the company had expired. The owner had social media profiles but had not made any posts for months. It appeared that the guy was either in a coma or dead.

Knowing how registrars work, the first thing that we needed to do was get his domain name renewed. Fortunately the dead guy had done a good thing by updating the ownership of the domain name to our concerned customer. I got him the phone number of the registrar and gave him instructions to explain the situation. The registrar was happy to accept a payment and renew the domain.

Now that the domain was no longer in danger of disappearing, we were able to log into the backend control panel for his website and download a backup of all the content. Next we moved to get control over the domain name. Again, knowing how registrars work, we were able to verify domain ownership and move the domain from the dead guy’s account to a new account at the registrar under the customer’s name. Once that was done, it was a simple matter to restore the website backup to our servers and change the nameservers to ours. Customer back online, and once again, in control!