Why Your Website Was Suspended, and How to Get It Back Print

First, which kind of suspension is it?

Three different things can suspend an account, and they have nothing to do with each other. The page shown on your domain tells you which one you are dealing with:

• Account suspension for an unpaid balance. The most common by far, and the main subject of this article.
• Bandwidth suspension, triggered by traffic exceeding what your plan allows. Covered further down, and fixed differently.
• Suspension for spam or abuse, which follows its own process entirely, set out in our article on email or accounts suspended for spam or abuse.

Suspension for an unpaid balance

Your account is suspended twelve days after an invoice's due date, following invoices issued in advance and three reminders along the way, the full schedule is in our article on how our billing works. Nothing about it is personal or targeted: an automated system sees a balance outstanding and acts, with no view on the amount, the reason, or how long you have been with us.

What stops working

Your website goes offline, replaced by a suspension notice. Email hosted with us stops too, incoming mail is rejected and senders receive bounce messages, so the practical effect is that your business goes quiet on both fronts at once. Anything else running on the account stops with it.

This is worth taking seriously for a reason that catches people out: bounced mail is not held anywhere and does not arrive later. Mail sent to you while suspended is refused, and senders have to send it again once you are restored.

How to get it back

Settle the outstanding balance, and that includes the full amount owing. Where an invoice has passed thirty days and the ten percent late fee has been added, that fee forms part of the balance and is not waived, by then the reminders have been running for well over a month.

• Paying through a gateway, card, instant EFT, or PayPal, confirms the payment automatically and restores your services immediately. No ticket needed, no waiting for office hours.
• Paying by bank transfer or cash deposit needs a nudge from you. Send us the proof of payment by support ticket, email, or WhatsApp on +27 72 270 9321, and our billing staff will check it against our bank statements. Because of the level of payment fraud around, we only ever process a payment once it genuinely reflects in our account, so a proof of payment speeds up the check but does not skip it.

If you are in a hurry, this is the single practical argument for using a gateway: it is the difference between instant restoration and waiting for a human to verify a bank statement.

If your site is still unreachable after paying

Occasionally a client repeatedly tries to log in during a suspension, and the server's security blocks their connection, which means their own internet connection cannot reach the site even after the account is restored. Everyone else can see it, you cannot. If that describes what you are seeing, message us on WhatsApp, email us, or open a ticket, and we will clear the block. Our article on website access issues explains the symptom in more detail.

Bandwidth suspension

This one is not about money. Each hosting plan includes a monthly traffic allowance, and if your website exceeds it, the account is suspended until the allowance resets.

Contact us by support ticket, email, or WhatsApp and we will unsuspend you, we are not in the business of holding a website hostage over a busy month. We then flag the account and watch it, because what happens next tells us what the cause actually was:

• A one-off spike is usually a bot crawling the site, a hacking attempt, or some other anomaly, high traffic that does not repeat and does not represent real visitors.
• A rising trend across the following two months means your site has genuinely outgrown its plan, and at that point we will recommend an upgrade rather than repeatedly unsuspending you. Our article on upgrading or downgrading your hosting plan covers how that works.

The distinction matters, and it is why we do not simply push an upgrade the first time it happens. One busy month is not a pattern.

Good to know

Suspension is a pause, not a deletion. Your website files, databases, and mailboxes remain intact on the server throughout, and everything returns exactly as it was the moment the account is restored. Even an account left suspended for a long stretch keeps its data, what eventually ends it is the domain lapsing, as explained in our article on cancelling hosting, connectivity, or a domain.

And if you can see a payment problem coming, tell us before the due date rather than after. The automation has no way of knowing a conversation is in progress, but we do, and a client who talks to us early always gets a fairer hearing than one who surfaces twelve days later.