Your IT provider no longer answers
Your e‑mails go unanswered, the phone rings out, and the application still runs. For now.
Sound familiar?
An IT services firm or a freelance developer built your application and looked after it. The answers became slower, then rarer. Today a request has been waiting for weeks, the hosting invoice keeps arriving, and nobody can tell you whether Tuesday's outage will happen again.
The reasons are usually mundane: the firm changed direction or owners, your account became too small for it, the person who looked after you left. Sometimes the provider's website has gone, or the company has been struck off the Belgian company register. It is not necessarily ill will. But your business still depends on a tool that nobody looks after any more.
What the silence is costing you
Nothing seems to change. That is precisely the risk.
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Nobody to call
The last time the tool crashed, who did you call, and how long did it last?
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Bills that keep coming
Are you still paying for hosting, maintenance or licences for a service nobody provides any more?
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Keys in someone else's hands
If the provider closes tomorrow, can you still reach your server, your domain name and your code?
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Overdue updates
When did anyone last apply a security update to the application and its server?
Every week of silence adds a little risk. The day something breaks, you find out what you no longer control.
Secure it this week
Before you change provider, find out what is in your name, and what is not.
- Gather what you have. Contract, quotes, invoices, e‑mails containing logins, access to a hosting dashboard: everything in one folder.
- The domain name, first. Find the registrar (on the DNS Belgium website for a .be domain, with a whois service for the others) and who manages the DNS; the registrar can confirm the registrant and the renewal date. An expired domain, or DNS settings nobody can change any more, take down the website and, often, the e‑mail.
- Hosting. Who receives the invoice, and whose name is on the account? If the provider pays and re-invoices you, ask for the account to be transferred to your name or, at the very least, for administrator access.
- A full backup. Ask for a copy of the code and the database, and keep it somewhere other than with the provider.
- Source code. Where is the repository, and do you have access? Check in the contract who owns the code and what was agreed for the end of the collaboration.
- Access. List the administrator accounts for the application, the server, the database and third-party services. For each one: who holds it, and do you have your own?
- Subscriptions. Licences, APIs, e‑mail sending, certificates, App Store and Google Play accounts: who pays for them, and in whose name? A subscription paid by a provider who disappears stops with them.
- A written request, courteous and precise. List what you need (access, code, a backup, transfer of the domain and the hosting), give a date, and keep a record. A precise e‑mail gets more answers than a reproach.
- Do not cut anything too early. Do not cancel the hosting or the contract before you have the code, the data and the access. If nothing moves, a lawyer can tell you what your contract provides for.
The full checklist, and why each point matters: taking over an application that nobody maintains any more.
Taking back control, with or without them
When your provider still answers, even slowly, we would rather work with them. An orderly handover beats an angry departure.
Everything starts with a health check, in two weeks. We work from what you already have: the access you hold, the server, the database, whatever is left of the code. No source code? That is where we start: recovering it is part of the health check.
And so that you are not left waiting again: the availability guarantee, a monthly line that guarantees you a response time. In other words, someone answers when it breaks.
Where to start?
Or is it your team that has no time, or your developer who has left?
Every situation: legacy application takeover.