I have a client for whom I created a basic website. At the time, the site hosting and domain registration/renewal was hosted by my friend. In October 2018, my friend passed away and left his affairs in the hands of his nephew, who is totally disinterested in keeping things going. I have been trying for over a year to get this person to relinquish control of the domains to me (or my client) so we can continue to do site updates. He has refused and mostly ignores my emails. It finally got to the point where my client felt that he must register a NEW domain name, which I did yesterday. Now, I'm trying to get the old sites to do a 301 redirect to the new domains, but again, no reply from the nephew. Because these domains are registered with DYNADOT, is there anything Dynadot can do to AT LEAST redirect the domains to the new one, so I don't lost my Google rankings and eventually lose the clients altogether when he allows the domain name and hosting to expire?
The old domain names are marukinrestaurant.net (old version of site) and marukinrestaurant.com (which appears to already be pointing nowhere). The new domain is marukinsteakandsushi.com, just registered a couple of days ago.
Hi there, I'm terribly sorry to hear of your situation! Unfortunately, we will not be able to make any changes to the domain. The domain owner will need to log in to their Dynadot account and make the changes or transfer the domain to you. You may be able to recover the domain if under trademark, but that requires a legal process.