They couldn't get their own domain name back
Anonymised on purpose. The point is not who they are, it is that the same thing is probably true of your website and you have never had a reason to check.
A company selling maintenance contracts came to me stuck. Their old web company still held the domain and the social accounts and would not hand them over. The website was years out of date and nobody at the company had a login to change it.
They had paid for that site. They had paid for it every year since. None of it was in their name.
Getting it back
Domain disputes are usually not a fight, they are paperwork that nobody wants to do. The registrant details, the billing history and the correspondence establish who it belongs to, and the registrar has a process. It is slow and it is dull, and most people give up at the point where it stops being obvious what to do next.
We did the paperwork. The domain came back into their name, on their card, with their email on the account.
The rebuild
I rebuilt the site so they own it outright. They edit it themselves with a login and a save button. Nothing to patch on a Friday night, no yearly bill for plugins and themes, and no cookie banner, because it isn’t following anyone around.
The maths on a site like this is not complicated. A small maintenance contract is worth a few hundred pounds a year, and it renews. The site has to win less than one customer, ever, to pay for itself.
What it would take to leave me
It runs anywhere, for nothing. About an hour of work to point the contact form and the visitor stats somewhere else. That is deliberate — see how to sack me.
