[JohnRoss]

Originally Posted by Mercy Design

Hi there.
A friend of ours commissioned a large agency to brand his company & build his website for a large figure. The job was manage extremely unsatisfactorily and the client has now withheld payment and begun legal proceedings. In the meantime, the agency, who have all log-in details for the website have taken it upon themselves to write expletives all over the homepage. The client has no access to the site and this is having a disastrous effect on his business.
Does anyone know if there's anything we can do to access this site?

Thanks so much for your help.

Gemma

gemmagermains@mercyonline.co.uk

Let's be fair, the agency has been seriously stiffed here - I mean, many of us have been through the experience of having a client refuse to pay when we have invested a large amount of time and/or money in a project, so I think the agency deserves at least a little of our sympathy. If your friend was not satisfied, surely he has other alternatives to simply refusing to pay. It must be a serious bummer for even a large agency to have a client renege, especially when that client is a biggish law firm, i.e. taking them to court is not the easy option.

Anyway, as Boss Hogg points out, a WHOIS search on the domain name reveals that it belongs to your friend's firm. A little poking around also shows that the nameservers used (nsX.livednos.co.uk) belong to Fasthosts, in other words, the agency probably did not bother to find a proper hosting service but took the free-or-cheap-hosting-with-domain-registration route. So it should be easy for your friend to assert his rights over the domain and probably even over the files hosted by Fasthosts (I could be wrong about this, in that other hosting services than Fasthosts apparently use the same nameservers - the list is here). He just needs to contact Fasthosts (or one of the other hosting services) and ask them to send him a new login and password to an e-mail address he can access. If he doesn't get satisfaction, he can have the domain name transferred to a different registrar (see here), but I really don't think that is likely to be necessary. Of course, if your friend is as web-challenged as he seems to be, he will probably then need to hire someone to manage the site from the control panel and take it down or back it up or whatever he wants done. I'd offer to do it myself but would most definitely require payment in advance.

[Boss Hog]

Originally Posted by JohnRoss

I'd offer to do it myself but would most definitely require payment in advance.