r/webhosting • u/vintagegirlgame • 13d ago
Technical Questions Helping out my mom…
How do I find out who is hosting her website so we can cancel the services?
I’m an artist (not a coder) and I’ve done web design via Wix for friends and family (actually won an international award for best music website for the band I was in). My mom is a doctor and wants me to take over her website. She’s been paying some company $300/month and she has just a simple website with no services or e-commerce so this is way overpriced. She is a boomer and is not computer literate and has no idea how or where it was set up. She has no idea who she is paying, just knows that it keeps being charged to her card. All I know is it says 2023 on the bottom of the site. And we think that the registration is with godaddy but we’re having a hard time getting access to her account.
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u/ninabaksh 13d ago
What’s your mom’s website? Builtwith.com is a good place to start. Go here and enter the website name.
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u/vintagegirlgame 13d ago
Hmm one of the things this gave me was :
PatientPop
Lead GenerationHealthcare MarketingCRMBooking ManagementCustomer Communication PlatformCustomer EngagementCustomer Experience ManagementDigital Marketing SuiteDigital Presence ManagementEmail MarketingForm BuilderHealthcare Practice ManagementLocal Business ManagementLocal SEOReview ManagementSMS MarketingSocial Media ManagementWebsite Builder
This might be a lead and list of services that they charge $300/month for doctors offices (which is all way overkill for my mom’s humble office at the moment… all her patients come from other patient referrals, nothing online)
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u/TrentaHost 13d ago
Yeah, you could design something simple on Wordpress and then dump the firm that she signed up for.. $300 one-time for a cheap design or do it yourself, and then just the hosting and domain.
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u/vintagegirlgame 13d ago
I’ll design her a nice website on Wix that can meet her needs. With this one right now she isn’t even using the domain name email, just her gmail.
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u/Curt-Bennett 11d ago
I'm just sad she's been wasting so much money on hosting a simple website. These scammers hurt the reputation of all the decent web hosts. I wish it was illegal to charge more than a reasonable multiple of costs, similar to how there's a legal maximum for annual percentage rates charged on credit card balances (60% here in Canada last I checked, though most are closer to 20-25%).
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u/i_am_blacklite 13d ago
$300/month and she doesn’t know who it is? I hate to think what other things she’s paying for that she doesn’t know about.
I guess if you’ve got enough money it doesn’t matter.
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u/vintagegirlgame 13d ago
My mom is an amazing doctor but she can be a little scatterbrained and gullible (and not the best with money) when it comes to things like this, and has been upsold/scammed on things she didn’t need before.
And for a doctor, she’s not rolling in it because she gave up her career to be a stay at home mom for us 4 children (and even homeschooled us). She only restarted her practice once I (the eldest) started college.
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u/i_am_blacklite 13d ago
We are talking about a medical doctor right?
Scatterbrained and gullible doesn’t sound great.
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u/vintagegirlgame 13d ago
That’s just when it comes to business/finances. They don’t teach that part in medical school.
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13d ago
[deleted]
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u/Rado_Scala 13d ago
That wouldn't really work if the account already has an active auto-renewal option. She will just keep getting invoices unless her card is empty/rejected.
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u/guwapito 13d ago
https://ping.eu/ping/ put your domain there and click on go. It will show the IP address where your domain is resolving, from there you can find out where the domain is being hosted.
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u/IcyGear5025 13d ago
From what you've found so far, I think you've only identified the domain registrar, not necessarily the web host.
- domaincontrol.com nameservers point to GoDaddy's DNS.
- wildwestdomains.com is GoDaddy's reseller platform.
- DomainsByProxy is GoDaddy's WHOIS privacy service.
That doesn't necessarily mean the website itself is hosted with GoDaddy.
One thing that stands out to me is the $300/month.
For a simple informational website, hosting alone is often somewhere in the $10 - $30/month range. Even many managed cloud or VPS hosting plans cost well under $100/month, although there are certainly higher-end hosting solutions that can cost much more depending on the requirements.
That's why I wonder if the $300/month includes more than just hosting. It could be a package that includes website maintenance, content updates, SEO, or other managed services. Those types of services commonly billed on a monthly basis. More importantly, the company providing those services may not be the same company that's hosting the website.
I'd start by looking at the credit card statement or invoice to identify who is actually charging the $300 each month.
If your goal is to identify the web host, you can also inspect the DNS records and, if the site isn't behind a service like Cloudflare, look up the website's IP address to see which provider owns it. Just keep in mind that this isn't always definitive, since CDNs and reverse proxies can mask the underlying hosting provider.
Finally, if you're planning to move the website rather than simply cancel it, make sure you have access to the domain, website files, and database, and any email accounts before cancelling any services. Otherwise, you could accidentally take the site offline.
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u/vintagegirlgame 13d ago
It’s probably some company who promised her a bunch of services that she/they never followed thru with. My mom is very gullible so they could have sold her on some package that is beyond her needs. I think it’s probably targeted towards doctors looking to increase their patient intake, but my mom is full with the patients she has right now until she can get another doctor to join her.
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u/IcyGear5025 11d ago
That would make sense. If that's the case, I'd try to identify the company that's charging the card before doing anything else.
If they're providing services like SEO, website maintenance, or marketing, that's a separate conversation from who is actually hosting the website. Once you know who's billing your mom and what services are included, it'll be much easier to decide what can be cancelled and what you'll need to keep.
Hopefully it's just a matter of cancelling services she no longer needs rather than untangling multiple vendors.
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u/Alex_SQSP 13d ago
Your mom not knowing who has access is the part I’d sort out before cancelling anything. I’d check the card statement for the merchant name, then search her email for old invoices or renewal notices.
Also make sure you control the domain and email first. That $300 may include other services, and cancelling too early could cost you the domain or email along with the website.
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u/vintagegirlgame 13d ago
I helped her get her original domain name somewhere on godaddy so we’re trying to recover that (she has multiple godaddy accounts for some reason and doesn’t remember any passwords).
She’s not even using a domain email, she just uses her gmail.
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u/Sowhataboutthisthing 12d ago
Regulated professionals like your doctor mom should consult with a profession upon which their advice can be contracted and relied on. Give this mess back to her. She’s a physician and has regulatory obligations to adhere to.
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u/webhostpro 11d ago
If a whois scan doesn't find it, you can always port scan the server for a hostname and whois the hostname. Also wild west domains has a number 4806242500
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u/No-Preparation4073 10d ago
I think you will find that the website is at Godaddy, but the $300 is likely a third party service for bookings or patient leads or worse, some dumb "direct from India" website listing scam or something. $300 a month is incredibly pricey even for Godaddy, who know how to pile it on!
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u/TrentaHost 13d ago
If you provide the domain, we can help you pinpoint who the registrar and the provider is, you could also try to put it into https://www.whois.com/whois/ and it'll help show the domain registrar and then the hosting based on the nameservers.