Closing Down or Moving On

Sadly, all good things come to an end!
So when the time comes for you to close down your website or move on elsewhere, we want to make things as easy as possible for you.

If you’re wanting to move on or cancel, please read the following important information and complete the form at the bottom to help us ensure things go smoothly and all details have been considered.

Please note we cannot cancel/transfer services without you first having completed the form below and then verifying with the account owner.
We encourage you to read the information below to better understand what’s involved before requesting any changes.

Your Domain Name

Most clients have a domain name registered by us on their behalf (eg yourdomain.com).
Your name controls the www.yourdomain.com website as well as anything@yourdomain.com email.

Domains are usually set up to renew automatically annually, so you need to be aware of when your domain renews and make sure either you give us enough notice to switch the auto-renew off (officially 30 days!) or you’ve made plans to transfer your domain elsewhere before the renewal date.

If not, the domain will renew automatically, and so you’ll be billed for that.

Domain transfer methods vary from provider to provider and the type of name being transferred – some require unlocks and transfer codes, others need just a tag change.  We’ll try our best to accommodate whatever transfer method is needed.

You should allow on average 72 hours for a domain name transfer (some domains and providers can take even longer!)  It’s a good idea to make any required DNS changes before transferring a domain to ensure things run smoothly.

Please be aware that sometimes domains will lose DNS entries during transfers.
Please ensure your new provider has used a DNS lookup service to make a note of any existing entries that you need to persist after the transfer as they may need to re-add them.

Alternative/Alias Domains

Many clients have more than one domain for their business, especially if they have renamed.  Please ensure that you fill in this form again for any other domains you wish to be considered. 

Your Email

Many clients have email set up as part of the service provided by us.  Be aware that if you cancel your domain name, then your email will stop working (in other words it requires your domain name to work).  Similarly if you transfer your domain name elsewhere then whoever takes over responsibility for your domain needs to make sure the email settings on the domain remain correct – otherwise your email could stop working.

Warning: if you cancel your email service, you’ll lose access to your email, so please be sure to make a backup of any important messages.  Once cancelled this cannot be undone and all previous emails will be lost.  You also want to make sure that the email addresses you’re cancelling are not used for any important services – for example, be sure that you don’t have a Facebook account set up using that email address – otherwise you may well lose access to those services, since they’ll no longer be able to send emails to you and the email address won’t work to reset the password.

Your Website

Tools like the Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine keep a copy of most websites, so the record of your website is unlikely to be gone for good even after your live site has stopped working.

If you’re closing a site down – you may want to give your existing customers notice.  It’s a good idea to replace your site with a holding page that explains what’s going on, when things will happen and so on. If you have a holding page, then it still needs a domain and still needs to be host.

You may also want to get search engines to de-list your website and remove your URLs from their index if the site is no longer going to be live so people don’t keep finding it in search results.

Some clients want a copy of their site, we can provide a zip files of all content you own and your database to help move things elsewhere.

Please keep in mind that some things (such as paid software, image and video licenses) are only valid whilst the service with us is being paid for – so you’ll need to make arrangements to purchase these or provide alternative solutions yourself, if you want your site to continue the same as before with another provider.

Your Online Marketing

If we’ve provided Online Marketing for you and your website is moving away then we’ll no longer be able to provide this service for you.

Finally

We will need to ensure that all outstanding account balances have been paid in full before your next steps can be completed – please check with your finance team that everything is up-to-date.

Please be aware that transfers of service can produce service outages – including website, email, domain and other services.  Once services leave our control, we can no longer support them, so your new provider will need to take over responsibility including any issues of transfer.

Please don’t forget to download any resources that we’ve shared with you or created for you (eg via Dropbox) as we won’t continue to store your files once your contract ends.

It’s common for many things to be associated with and integrated into your website, domain and email – please let us know which of these you need provisions making for – this can include, but is not limited to:

• Secondary/Related Domain Names (please fill in separate forms for each domain)
• Login Credentials to other websites using your email address (remember, most passwords cannot be reset if the associated email address is no longer working)
• Social Media Accounts
• Website Analytics & Reports
• Integrations
• Search Console
• Google My Business
• Street View Virtual Tours

If you’re cancelling everything, we’ll do our best to remove ourselves from all services related to your business.  Please ensure you’ve got access to any related services before cancellation date as this cannot be undone and we’re unable to make changes once we’ve been removed.

We recommend you make plans to minimise risks associated with moving or cancelling your website.
We can offer a paid, managed service if needed.

Also, lastly, just to say thank you for working with us and we wish you all the best in the future.  We’ll do everything we can to make the next steps as smooth as possible for you.

Please use the following form to let us know what you’d like to do next and help ensure things go smoothly without any details being missed: