Has your current Digital Agency gone into Liquidation? What to do next.

Ever since EXA went into liquidation this morning, companies in Australia have to now cater for this unlikely event with their websites. What happens if your Web Design Agency goes into Liquidation?

When a company goes into liquidation in Australia, the company is effectively closed and the assets liquidated. If you have your site hosted with a company which has gone into liquidation, this essentially means that your site will close down at some point. Usually data centers are paid for in a month in advance so you are likely to have your site for until the end of the month.

Here is a quick step by step checklist to make sure you can move properly to a new agency.

Scrape your current website

Since your agency is liquidated, you may not be able to get a hold of the staff. It might be impossible to get access to your files, so you need to scrape the static content of the sites.  Usually this is a technical thing to do, so best to assign this to an IT person or a digital agency. 

Get admin access to the site backend or access to the files

Get in touch with your account manager/producer ASAP and try to get access to the backend or access to the files. Were there any past backups? Do you have access to them? Past backups or backend access works best to recover your website.

Get access to domain

This is also a crucial step, if your current agency registered your domain name, you need access to that ASAP. Reach out to your Account Manager for access to domain. We at NetON prefer our clients handle domains themselves for this reason.  If you can’t reach out to any of the staff, you can also reach out to the registrar (eg CrazyDomains, NetRegistry, Melbourne IT) to get access to your domain name.

Back up your emails

If your emails are hosted with your current agency, you need to backup your emails ASAP. If your emails are hosted with Office 365 or Google Apps, then you don’t need to do this step.

Get a new Agency to setup your website

Get whatever asset you have (static scraped website) or access to files, get another agency to setup your website on a new host. This will mean that you are safe from the site going down.