Your web designer disappeared. Here is how to get your site back.

Step 1: find out who controls your domain

Look up your domain on a public WHOIS service (search "whois lookup", enter yourbusiness.ca). Three outcomes:

• It is registered to you or your email. You are fine. Do a password reset at the registrar named in the record and you hold the keys.
• It is registered to the designer. Email them a transfer request in writing. In Canada, .ca disputes go through CIRA’s dispute process if they will not respond; most registrars also have an escalation path when the registrant is unreachable.
• It is privacy-masked. Contact the registrar shown and prove the business connection (invoices mentioning the domain help). Registrars deal with this constantly.

Whatever happens next, the lesson is permanent: the domain is registered in your name or it is not yours.

Step 2: rescue your files before the hosting lapses

If the site is still online, its public pages can be copied from the live site today. Ask any technical friend to "crawl" it, or use a site-download tool. That copy is imperfect (forms and admin systems do not come along) but it preserves your text, images and design while you sort the rest.

If the site is already offline, check the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Type your address in and there is a good chance snapshots of your pages exist. It is a taxpayer-of-the-internet miracle and it has saved a lot of small businesses.

Step 3: hosting is the part not worth fighting for

Hosting accounts in a vanished designer’s name are usually not worth recovering: the monthly value is small and any competent replacement can host your rescued files somewhere new within a day, then point your domain at it. Spend your energy on the domain and the files; let the hosting go.

One exception: if email for your business runs through the same account ([email protected]), say so to whoever helps you next before anything is cancelled, so mail is moved first and nothing bounces.

How to make this impossible next time

Put these four lines in any future agreement, and walk away from anyone who resists them:

• The domain is registered in my name, at a registrar account I control.
• I receive a copy of the complete site files after launch and after any major change.
• All accounts created for my business list my email as owner or recovery address.
• If we part ways, handover is included, not billed.

This is how we work, stated as a checkable fact rather than a promise: every Droom client gets the repository itself, the complete versioned site, as the standard handover, and the domain never leaves the client’s name. The pricing page says the same thing in writing. If you are rebuilding after a disappearance, the website service starts with the rescue steps above, done for you.