How can I find out who owns a WordPress site?

  • Unknown's avatar
    surfmerchants · Member ·

    I’m supposed to set up a site for a business, and there is already a wordpress site with that business name. As it’s vanishingly unlikely that there is another site with the same name anywhere in the world, and as it appears nothing was actually done with this site, I’m trying to find out who owns it so I can, I don’t know, maybe transfer ownership? How do I do this?

  • Unknown's avatar
    sfarley85 · Member ·

    Howdy,

    You can find public information for who owns a domain by using a whois lookup, such as the one found here: http://www.tucowsdomains.com. From there you can contact the owner and see about transferring ownership.

    Here’s a bit more advice for your particular situation: http://lifehacker.com/what-do-i-do-when-someone-has-a-domain-name-i-want-1550716320

    Also keep in mind for future posts this particular forum is for support for those using WordPress.com hosting. For issues such as this one (that do not directly involve assistance with a WordPress.com site you own or administer) you can use the WordPress.org forums found here: https://wordpress.org/support/.

    Good luck!

  • Unknown's avatar
    lilbrownbat · Member ·

    I see that I was insufficiently clear. This site IS hosted on wordpress.com. <businessname>.wordpress.com — I would have thought this obvious from my question, but I guess not (you probably get questions like that all the time). Whoever set the site up has not done anything with it, and this is a unique business name, not acmeplumbing.wordpress.com or anything like that. I know about hosting and DNS naming. That is not the issue. The problem remains and I need to solve it.

  • Unknown's avatar
    auxclass · Member ·

    You need to contact the blog owner yourself – WordPress.COM will not help you, they will not give you any contact info for privacy reasons, nor will they contact the blog owner on your behalf

    see if there is contact info on the site or leave a comment and maybe the comment is moderated and an email is sent to the blog owner

  • Unknown's avatar
    lilbrownbat · Member ·

    Again, I seem to have been insufficiently clear. Perhaps I overestimated the degree to which people would credit me for trying the blatantly obvious solutions such as “contact the blog owner”. I CANNOT contact the “blog owner” because there is no contact information available. None. Zero. Zip. Nada. The blog consists of exactly one entry, the boilerplate “this is your first blog entry”. It has clearly never been touched since the day it was set up in 2009. There is no means of contact WHATSOEVER. If WordPress will not help, is there a good reason why WordPress will allow a blog to be created with the unique and unambiguous name of a business, and not allow the business owner to do a thing about it, and not provide any assistance in resolving the matter?

  • Unknown's avatar
    auxclass · Member ·

    it is their policy and a total respect of privacy of the original blog owner I have provided you the correct answer above – sorry it is not what you wanted to hear

    try asking your employees and see if anyone past or present will own up to creating the blog name as a surprise for you –

    The staff will give you the same answer – I understand exactly what your question was

  • Unknown's avatar
    timethief · Member ·

    There is no expiration date on .wordpress.com blogs unused, reserved or otherwise. In the case that there is no contact information or you do not get a response to a contact form submission or to a comment on the site, as auxclass said Staff will not breach the privacy policy and provide you with an email address.
    https://en.support.wordpress.com/private-user-data/
    https://en.support.wordpress.com/private-information/

    You can register another .wordpress.com blog http://en.support.wordpress.com/register-a-blog/

    Then if you wish to you can register a domain via a domain mapping upgrade because it does not matter what the underlying .wordpress.com address is when you are domain mapping.
    http://en.support.wordpress.com/domain-mapping/
    http://en.support.wordpress.com/domain-mapping/register-domain/

    and there is already a wordpress site with that business name

    Trademark Policy https://automattic.com/trademark-policy/
    If you believe that content hosted on wordpress.com infringes your trademark, you may send in an infringement notice by following the instructions at: http://automattic.com/trademark-policy/

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