Issue accessing domain information hosted on Cloudflare managed by unknown previous developer
Hi there, I'm looking for help accessing the domain for my University Faculty's student club website www.cogsubc.ca. We're in the midst of building out a new website on weebly, but when trying to connect it to this old domain (which had been sitting attached to a dormant website for ~6 years) we ran into the issue of not knowing how to acess this. We thought it was hosted on weebly, but their domain connection service pointed us to cloudflare as the detected host. We tried finding the account thru "forgot my email" but it said that the domain didn't exist on the internet, even tho it's currently still pointing to the old website. Wanted to reach out thru web helpdesk but we don't have a cloudflare account and the FAQs said to ask here. Appreciate any help!
16 Replies
Hey 👋
Make sure you put the actual domain
cogsubc.ca into the forgot your email tool, not www.cogsubc.ca, the www part is just a subdomain, the actual site is cogsubc.ca
These are the helpful links we have:
These links may help, but they only work when logged out  If you know the email: https://dash.cloudflare.com/forgot-password If you know the email and have 2FA issues: https://dash.cloudflare.com/login-help If you don’t know the email: https://dash.cloudflare.com/forgot-email
hi @Chaika , thats what i did. it didn't work
Oh jokes, I just got a new response
The input it wants is just
cogsubc.ca, but yea it should work if you enter just that
It's just going to send an email to the account on filegotcha
We thought it was hosted on weebly, but their domain connection service pointed us to cloudflare as the detected host.In response to this though, it could very well still be hosted on weebly. Cloudflare is normally used as just a CDN, like a bouncer to a club. It's in front of your actual host, caching requests and protecting it
I've disconnected the domain from the weebly account, so now it's connected to nothing asfaik
you might have disconnected it from one account, but it's still making requests to cdn2.editmysite.com for assets, which is weebly's domain
Do you have access to the registrar account used for the domain, which appears to be dot-ca-registry?
nope :/
some more context on the current situation:
the website was last updated by a team from 2+ years ago
we've tried reaching out to members of those teams but have only hit dead ends or no responses
we've considered swapping the domain for a new one, but this is the domain currenltly used on a lot of print material so its ideal to keep it, assuming we can salvage it
Well you can always make a new Cloudflare account and reconfigure it. If you're remaking the website entirely you might not even need access to the currently weebly account, but one thing you absolutely need access to is the Registrar for it, so you could point it to a new CF Account/Nameservers/keep it paid/etc
i see, our team made a new website for it using the existing (what we think is the existing, at least) weebly account, and have it currently published to http://cogsubc.weebly.com/
COGNITIVE SYSTEMS SOCIETY
COGNITIVE SYSTEMS SOCIETY
The website for the UBC Cognitive Systems Society.
how might we gain access to the registrar?
sry kinda new to this so im learning as i go
well this is the Registrar for that site: https://www.dot-ca-registry.ca/
You could try contacting them. In the whois for the site under contacts it says
Please ask the Registrar of Record identified in this output for information on how to contact the Registrant, Admin, or Other contacts of the queried domain nameSo you could ask them to try to reach out to the original people as well
dot-ca-registry.ca | .ca Domain registrations, renewals, transfers ...
dot-ca-registry.ca has been a CIRA-certified registrar for .ca domains since 2001. dot-ca-registry.ca offers registrations, renewals, transfers and tbr's of .ca domain names and has a robust suite of tools for domainers.
o
honestly you might have better luck asking around locally to see if anyone knows anyone who has access to it. In terms of regaining access to things, you currently have access to nothing so you're fighting a hell of an uphill battle to try to prove ownership of anything
yeah that makes sense 😢
You need access to the Registrar at the bare minimum, then you could reconfigure everything else
In terms of Cloudflare, CF can't really help you if you don't have access to the host (to add files to verify yourself), or the email/account, and even if you did have access to CF, you'd still need access to the Registrar so you wouldn't lose the domain