Best Berries

The situation

Best Berries is a small, family-run frozen berry retailer in Wynberg, Cape Town. Like thousands of small businesses across South Africa, they relied on one trusted developer to look after their website and email for years. That arrangement worked well until circumstances outside everyone's control brought it to a sudden stop.

Through no fault of anyone involved, the handover of their online accounts never happened the way it should have. When the domain moved to new management, three things went wrong at once: their website went offline, their business email stopped working overnight, and the existing site had been compromised and needed replacing rather than restoring.

For a business that runs on daily communication with customers and suppliers, losing email is not an inconvenience. It is the business going quiet.

What we did

We treated this as two jobs running in parallel: get the business back online quickly, and rebuild properly so it never happens again.

Restored communication first. We took control of the domain's DNS and stood up new, reliable mailboxes so the owners could send and receive again. Getting their email working was the first priority, because everything else could wait and that could not.

Rebuilt the website cleanly. Rather than try to salvage a compromised site, we built a fresh, modern site from the ground up - free of the issues that had crept into the old one.

Put everything in the client's name. This is the part that matters most for the long term. The domain, the hosting, and the email accounts are all now registered in Best Berries' own name. We hold delegated access to do our work, but the business owns its own foundations. If they ever choose to work with someone else, nothing is locked away.

The core principle throughout: this is a structural problem, not a trust problem. When the accounts live in the client's name from the start, neither the business nor the developer is ever held hostage by the other.

What changed

• Best Berries is back online with a clean, modern website.
• Business email is fully restored and running on stable infrastructure.
• Every account - the domain, hosting, and mailboxes - is now owned by the client.
• The business has a clear, documented setup and a maintenance arrangement so small issues get caught early.

What it cost

This was scoped as a Site Rebuild engagement with domain recovery, email restoration, and ongoing care. The pricing sits within the ranges published on our Services page.

If you are in a similar situation - a website you cannot access, email that has stopped working, or accounts registered in someone else's name - book a call and we will assess what it takes to get you back in control.

Who this fits

If you are a small business that has lost access to your website, your email, or the accounts that underpin your online presence, this is exactly the kind of engagement we handle. Same approach, same principle: everything in your name, everything under your control.