Your web host is closing down. What to do first

When your web hosting is closing down, get the closing date in writing first, then find out where your domain is registered and where your email runs, because email that runs through the closing hosting stops when the hosting does. Only then turn to the website itself, starting with saving a copy of everything while you can still get at it.

The order matters more than speed. Here is the order I would work in.

1. Get the date, and what exactly is closing

Ask the company for the date in writing, and ask exactly what stops on that date: the website, the email, the domain, or all three. A deadline changes the order everything else happens in, and it is the difference between a planned move and a scramble.

Ask too whether they will help you move, and what they can hand over. It costs nothing to ask.

2. Find out where your domain is registered

The domain is your address, and it may or may not be with the company that is closing. Look it up to see which company it is registered with, and then ask that company whose name it is in. How to find out who owns your domain name walks through the lookup and what to do with what you find.

If the domain is registered through the company that is closing, ask them to move it into your name before anything else. Everything else on this list can be rebuilt. The address your customers know cannot.

3. Find out where your email runs

Email is the part most likely to catch you out, because it depends on settings that may sit with the company that is closing. If your mailboxes, or the forwarding that sends your business address to your own inbox, are on the hosting that is closing, your email will stop with it.

So find out what you have. Real mailboxes need moving to a new email service, with the old messages copied across if you want them. Forwarding needs setting up again somewhere else. Either way, set it up and test it before the switch rather than after, so mail keeps arriving while everything else moves underneath it.

On Stephen’s site, the forwarding for his info address sat on the hosting that was about to disappear. It was set up again and tested before anything was switched over, so his mail kept reaching his inbox.

4. Save a copy of the site

While the hosting is still running, ask for a backup of everything on it. If the site runs on WordPress, WordPress’s own documentation says a backup has two parts, the database and the files, and that you need both to restore a typical site (WordPress, checked October 2026). Save your own copy of the text and images too, page by page if you have to.

As a backstop, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine keeps copies of web pages over time, and its Save Page Now tool captures a page as it looks today (Wayback Machine, checked October 2026). It is worth saving your most important pages there before the closing date, but treat it as a last resort rather than your backup.

5. List the addresses of your pages

Make a list of every page address on the old site: the home page, each service, each article. When the site moves, each of those addresses should redirect to its replacement on the new site. That way the links people already have still work, and you do not start again from nothing in search.

6. Decide what happens to the site itself

If your site is on WordPress, Wix, Squarespace or another site builder, I do not keep that platform running or make changes inside it. I rebuild the site properly as files you own, with nothing to update, and move it with your domain and email in one job. If it is already plain code, such as hand written HTML, it can move as it is. I explain both on rebuilding and moving your website, and look at what you have for free before I quote, because a move cannot be priced honestly from the outside.

Whichever you choose, the domain, the hosting and the email should end up in accounts in your name, so you are never in this position again.

What happened with Stephen’s

Stephen’s site had been on WordPress for years, built and hosted by someone else, who was closing the hosting at the end of September. The domain, the settings that point it at the site, the email forwarding and the site itself all lived in an account he could not log into, and a second domain pointed at the site too.

Both domains moved onto new hosting, his 37 articles came across with their images and kept their addresses, and his email was tested before the switch. The new site went live on the evening of 16 September, a fortnight before the old hosting closed. The case study has the full story.