There are several layers to owning and managing a web site.

1) You have to own, or at least have technical control of, the domain. This is done at the domain registration level. It is common for one person (say, a company) to have administrative ownership of the domain while another (the website manager) has technical control, but both are usually in the same name. Admin control trumps tech control but sometimes you have to exercise registration override authority.

2) You have to have a website host - a server location somewhere that will hold the site files and answer the door when users knock by entering the URL.

3) You have to have your domain pointed to the host by means of DNS mapping. DNS is what tells the world that "joebitesdog.com" should be translated to "75.120.250.5" or another dotted-quad address that the network machinery really uses to navigate and connect.

I can't quite tell from the description where she's having trouble. From the domain registration, it looks as if she (Josephine?) has admin ownership and control while a hosting or registration service has the technical control. She may need to transfer the domain registration to another service - I would recommend a quality pay one, not a cheapie or freebie service; you get what you pay for.

Once she has unfettered control of the registration, she needs to (1) get a hosting account with someone - this is NOT the same as domain registration and ownership - and then (2) get the domain registrar to point the DNS entries to that new hosting. She then (3) should be able to build a new website on that host, at that address. If she had a functioning website somewhere before, it likely is no longer there - I can't really say, though, without more info.

Happy to help further if needed.

Josephine asked me to relay my thanks to Jim and Robert for the suggestions. I also posted my plea on the message board of the Silicon Valley Mac User Group, and someone there recommended signing up with a new hosting service (he recommended BlueHost) and let their techies worry about getting everything repaired. She likes that option and has had pleasant dealings with BlueHost in the past, so that's what she's going to try. Once again, we appreciate the help.

Dan

That's basically what I was going to suggest when we connected (she never replied to my email). Go to a good hosting company, buy yer hosting there, transfer in your registrations and let them battle the former registrar for you.

There will be many tedious bits along the way - logging into approve the transfer, responding to email to acknowledge the transfer, etc. - but in a few short days she should have unfettered control of both the domains and the host sites, and be ready to march onward.

I'm sorry to hear she wasn't polite enough to acknowledge your email. Thanks for trying.

According to whois, the .com site is already hosted by BlueHost, and the registrant and administrative contact info is already correct, so I guess it's just a matter of enlisting their techies' help to oust the squatter. I can't tell what's up with the .co.uk site.

Both sites appear to have her address as the admin contact. I don't see any squatter involved here except that the technical contact for the .com is the hosting service.

Transfer to a third party hosting service and working it through should clear the blockage.

Part of my confusion come from not understanding if she has an actual web site somewhere that someone has blocked or hijacked. That doesn't appear to be the case, so all she has to do is untangle the domain ownership and get it pointed to new hosting.

My understanding was that the content on the two sites wasn't what she wanted there, for whatever reason, and she was unable to change it. She seems to believe she knows who has control of the content and he won't return that control to her. But I have no idea what it is, precisely, that gives a particular person that control, and what it takes to move the control to a different person.

Thanks for changing the name of this board. I think it makes it easier to figure out what topics are appropriate here.

I am still a little bit confused but your comments indicate that there's a discontinuity between her ownership and someone else's site access and control. Admin control and ownership always win, so changing the technical access and re-pointing the domain to a new host and site is straightforward.

There are ways to give a third party access to a web site for editing and update, but it involves assigning them a controlled FTP account - they can only use it to access the web site files, not any of the control or admin functions, and the account can be blocked, limited or deleted at any time by the site owner/admin. It is common to have such accounts for a third-party web developer and to disable the accounts unless an authorized round of updating etc. is taking place.