Cancelling Hosting, Connectivity, or a Domain Print

Start here: cancelling is not one process

Hosting and connectivity services are cancelled by opening a support ticket with us. Domains are cancelled by you, in the client portal, by switching off auto-renew. The two work differently, and this article covers both, along with what happens to your data and what you can expect back.

Cancelling hosting or connectivity

The self-service cancellation button is deliberately switched off in our system, and there is a good reason for it. Our billing platform only offers two options, cancel immediately or cancel at the end of the current billing period, and neither fits our connectivity products, which require notice through to the end of the following billing period. Rather than offer a button that would set the wrong date and leave you with an unexpected bill, we handle every cancellation by hand.

So: open a support ticket telling us which service you want cancelled and when you want it to end. We confirm the correct termination date back to you and set it in the system.

When your service actually ends

• Hosting can end at the close of your current billing period, or immediately if you genuinely want it gone. Immediate cancellation is available, but understand what it costs you: there is no refund for unused time, so ending an annual plan in month three means forfeiting nine months you have already paid for.
• Connectivity services, our Fibre and LTE products, require notice through to the end of the following calendar month. Cancel on 15 June and the account is payable to the end of July. This is a condition of the underlying services, not a penalty we have invented, and it applies no matter which day of the month you give notice, so notice given early in a month costs you the same as notice given late in it.
• Domains always run to the end of their paid term. They cannot be ended early, and since domains are billed annually, that term may run well past the hosting it sits alongside.

What happens to your data

Nothing is deleted while your service is still running. If you cancel at the end of a billing period, everything stays exactly as it is until that date arrives, your website, your databases, and your mailboxes all continue working normally. On the termination date the account is removed from the server and its data is deleted.

Take your backup before the termination date, not after. Once the account is removed, the data is gone, and we cannot retrieve it for you. cPanel's backup tools let you download your files and databases, and any mail you want to keep should be downloaded too, our email articles cover archiving mail locally.

If your account was suspended for non-payment

A suspended account is not a deleted one. Your data remains intact on the server, and the account stays in place while the balance is outstanding. What eventually ends it is the domain: when the domain reaches its renewal and goes unpaid, it lapses with the registrar, and once it has passed through the grace and redemption periods described in our article on domain expiry, we remove the account and its data from the server.

Up until that point, your files are still there, and we will happily release them to you once the account is paid up in full.

Cancelling a domain

This one is entirely in your hands, and it takes about thirty seconds:

1. Log in to your client portal.
2. Open your domains list and select the domain you want to cancel.
3. Click Auto Renew, then Disable Auto Renew.

That is the whole process. Switching off auto-renew stops the renewal invoice from being generated, and with no invoice and no payment, the domain lapses with the registrar at its expiry date. It then passes through the registry's grace and redemption periods before being deleted and released, the timeline set out in our article on domain expiry and redemption.

A domain cannot be deleted before its expiry date, and you keep full use of it until then. Disabling auto-renew simply means nothing happens when the date arrives.

Before you let it go

This article assumes you are cancelling deliberately, which is exactly how a domain should be given up. Two alternatives are worth thirty seconds of thought first, because a released domain is gone for good and often picked up quickly by others:

• Keep it parked. Free parking costs nothing beyond the domain's own renewal and holds the name for you. Parking with redirect, at a small annual fee, sends its visitors to another domain of yours, which is the graceful way to retire a website while keeping the traffic and links it earned. Our article on domain parking covers both.
• Transfer it away if you are keeping the name but moving providers, covered in our article on transferring a domain. Letting a domain lapse in order to move it is not a transfer, it is a gamble that nobody else registers it first.

Refunds

Our position is that services are paid in advance and cancellation does not produce a refund for unused time. If you cancel three months into an annual plan, the remaining nine months are not refunded, which is why choosing a billing cycle you are comfortable with matters more than the discount on a longer one.

That said, circumstances vary, and if you believe yours warrant a different outcome, raise it with us in your cancellation ticket. We will consider genuine situations on their merits. That is discretion rather than policy, we make no commitment in advance, and the stated position above is what applies by default.

When we cancel an account

Occasionally we terminate an account ourselves, for spam, abuse, or legal reasons. In those cases the account is closed and its contents are preserved for law enforcement rather than deleted, and where phishing or impersonation is involved the outcome follows the policy in our article on accounts suspended for spam or abuse.

Good to know

Sequence matters when you are leaving. Move your website and email to their new home first, confirm everything works there, and only then cancel with us, exactly as we advise clients arriving from other hosts. Cancelling first turns a planned migration into an emergency, and the one thing nobody can undo is a domain that has already been released.