Your agency has gone and your Umbraco site is stranded. I recover the code, database and hosting, put them in your name and keep the site safely alive.
The email bounces. The phone rings out. Someone checks Companies House on a hunch, and there it is: the agency that built and hosted your website is in liquidation, or acquired, or has simply evaporated in the way small companies sometimes do. Your site is still up, for now, running on servers you cannot name, paid for by a company that no longer exists, deployed from a repository you have never seen.
The old way of handling this was panic followed by a rebuild: a new agency declares the old site unknowable and quotes for starting again, and eighteen months of content, SEO equity and custom features go in the bin because nobody could find the keys.
Nearly all of it is recoverable. Getting stranded sites back into their owners' hands is established work for me, and it is far more methodical than the panic suggests.
Code, database, media, domain, DNS, certificates, hosting accounts. I trace where each actually lives, from cooperative liquidators to nothing but the live server itself.
Everything recoverable gets copied into accounts registered to you, not to me. Whatever happens next, nobody can strand you twice.
The site moves to managed hosting, missed security patches go on, backups are set up and proven by a test restore. The emergency is over.
You get a written map of how your site fits together and where every credential lives, so no future supplier can ever hold it hostage.
A stranded site fails on a timer you cannot see. Somewhere there is a hosting bill on a dead company's credit card, a TLS certificate with a renewal date, a domain registration ticking towards expiry. The site works today because none of those timers has fired yet. The single most important thing you can do is start the recovery while everything is still up, because extracting a site from a live server is routine and reconstructing one from a dead server is archaeology.
After fourteen years and more than 200 Umbraco sites, I know where agencies of every era tended to keep things: which source control services were fashionable when your site was built, how deployments were typically wired, what a 2018-vintage Umbraco Cloud setup looks like from the outside. That pattern knowledge is why recoveries that look hopeless from inside your organisation are usually straightforward from inside mine. Even when the only artefact left is the live site itself, an Umbraco install carries enough of its own history to be rebuilt into a maintainable project.
Once the site is safe, it needs what the old agency was supposed to be providing. Most rescues settle onto my managed hosting, £99 a month all-in on Umbraco Cloud Starter or £149 a month on my own servers, with patches applied within 48 hours and backups verified by real test restores. Sites that missed years of updates under the declining agency often need a catch-up plan too, which is ordinary support and maintenance work once the panic subsides.
Write down what you know, however little: the agency name, your domain, any logins anyone has, when things went quiet. Send it via the contact page. I reply within one working day, usually the same day, and the first reply will tell you which timers matter most in your specific case. The site is probably far more saveable than it feels right now.
Tell me what you're working on and I'll come back within one working day.
A specialist Umbraco developer offering freelance / contract services to a wide variety of clients across the UK
Maesgwyn, 3 Claremont rd,
Llandudno, North Wales, LL30 2UF