Does anyone know what's happened to getfreehosting.co.uk?

definitivefreak

I use getfreehosting.co.uk for my website, and my dad's website, using custom domains that I purchased. I also have custom email through Google using my domain name. I noticed that I hadn't received any email to it since Friday, and today I tried sending myself an email from another account, but nothing happened. Going through troubleshooting, it seemed there was a problem on getfreehosting's end. But when I went to their site to log in, it comes up with a page from Heart Internet saying "getfreehosting.co.uk Your domain has expired – please log in to renew".

Does this mean that not only have I lost my websites, I've lost my email?

aerostar

Heart Internet is the registrar - looking at the whois it was registered to a D Rhys "The registrant is a non-trading individual who has opted to have their
address omitted from the WHOIS service."

Registered on: 23-Mar-2008
Expiry date: 23-Mar-2014
Last updated: 28-Mar-2014

This means that D Rhys has not paid to renew the domain !

The only thing you could perhaps do is contact Nominet http://www.nominet.org.uk as they would/should have correct details - but may not be able to do much if the person has dis-appeared.

Tiexen

Might be an idea to contact Heart internet - see of they can rescue your domain

wrinx

Another unhappy customer here.

I'm guessing the host has gone under, an email would have been nice.

Transferring my site to a paid host to try and avoid this in futre, Getfreehosting weren't particularly fast anyway

Good luck retrieving your information, thankfully mine was just a website which is on my hard-drive.

wrinx

paddyrg

Guess his business model wasn't great if he gave away something and didn't have a revenue stream. You can get such good value paid hosting from companies that will be less likely to vanish it's worth it for any kind of business.

Adethemuso

I was only using their free hosting service for a domain we purchased elsewhere. Still infuriating that they just disappeared without even the courtesy of 24 hours to grab a backup before they went...
I'm now paying for hosting, through a major brand name. It's pretty cheap, the website designer helped me get up to speed within 4 hours and I've got a month's free trial. Not too disastrous.
I feel really sorry for anyone who has been paying them. This is wretched.
Regarding email though, if you own a domain name then it's possible to set up an email account using that domain name on Microsoft live - I've done it and it forwards to my personal email. Works fine. There are options to do it on Google+ and I'm sure other providers too. It costs nothing, and it works. Worth a look if you still have the domain rights but don't have an email server any more...

Adethemuso

There's a little wrinkle you may be able to use to recover your content (at least the text) from a website that's down. If you google some of the content you know should have been there, then you may find the relevant pages in the search listing even though they are not live any more. If you click on the down arrow next to the page listing it allows you to view a cached version of the page - and then you can copy and paste the text, at least. Worth a try. I have just done that to retrieve the list of all the gigs we have played and it works fine!

wrinx

It may be of little consolation now, but this is the company I moved to, the cheapest I could find, but much easier to use that getfreehosting and MUCH faster!

Edit: not allowed to post links...the company is one dot com (I have no affiliation with them whatsoever).

wrinx

System

aerostar wrote: »

The only thing you could perhaps do is contact Nominet http://www.nominet.org.uk as they would/should have correct details - but may not be able to do much if the person has dis-appeared.

Nominet will not do anything. They do not chase up people who have not renewed their domian registration and only have the details for a registrant provided by the registrant on initial registration or updated by the registrant.

The details that you see by doing a whois are the details held by Nominet

I don't even think trying to argue that his address should be shown as he is trading would work as this is now an expired domain so no longer live and active

aerostar

!!!!!! wrote: »

The details that you see by doing a whois are the details held by Nominet

Wrong !

I stated from the whois lookup

"The registrant is a non-trading individual who has opted to have their address omitted from the WHOIS service."

Nominet will have further details and so would Heart Internet !

System

I meant any other information available to them about the owner hence my last sentence.

And as I said, as a suspended domain it is doubtful whether you will get any more info. It is immaterial whether he is trading or not, if the domain is no longer live he is now non-trading. Even if the site was still live you would not be given any information, they would just update the record