CANCELING YOUR WEB HOST CAN BE A TRICKY PROCESS

It isn’t as easy as you’d think. Especially if you’re using a hosting service for your WordPress website. Common sense tells you to log in to your web hosting account, in this case, Blue Host, and look for a link that says cancel subscription. Simple, right? Not exactly. You won’t find a cancel subscription button as there’s no such category. Instead you have to go the hamburger menu (3 lines top left corner), click on Hosting then Renewal Center (bottom left) and look for the button at the top of the page that says Disable Auto Renew. If that button is blue that means your account will automatically renew when your due date comes around. If you don’t want it to renew automatically then check the boxes at left such as domain name, site lock essentials, domain privacy, code guard basic, WordPress hosting and click on the Disable Auto Renew button. Once you do that it will now will be greyed out. This page will not tell you the amount owed but shows which services are up for renewal.

Let’s say you’re not looking to renew your web hosting and related services. For whatever reason you no longer want your website and you don’t want to pay for something you’re not using. Here’s the catch. You can’t simply cancel your service. The best you can do with BlueHost is to disable your renewal. Normally 15 days before your renewal date comes around your account would be charged. They do it two weeks in advance so if your payment is declined you have time to change payment before the due date. Once your due date comes up, if you haven’t paid your account, your account will go offline. The data is still there but your website won’t be active. You have 30 days to pay or your data will be permanently removed. That’s how you cancel your account. Wait until the 30 days is up. You have to wait until that renewal date. They don’t cancel accounts before the renewal date. You’ll notice when you sign up you have to choose a 12, 24 or 36 month term. So, as an example, if you’ve chosen a 12 month term, you paid for that upfront. So technically there’s no canceling before the term is finished. Even though your account is offline Blue Host does keep your files in their system for 30 days in case you change your mind and don’t want to cancel. If you decide you want to transfer your site to another hosting service, like Hostgator or NameCheap, you can certainly do that but make sure you do it before your renewal comes up. Your account has to be active before it can be transferred. But get this done before your renewal comes up. You don’t want to pay for another year of hosting if you’re going to transfer to another host.

There are several hosts available offering basically the same service. Your first year of service is always going to be cheaper than the renewal years because the first year rates are leader rates, meaning a rate to get you in the virtual door. There can be some sticker shock with the renewal rates. In one case the first year of web hosting and other services were roughly $60 (5 dollars a month) but when renewal came around that annual rate jumped to $265! And then you have to add on other services like the domain name, site lock, etc which in this case added up to an annual bill of nearly $445. Quite a jump from $60. And often you won’t know what these annual renewal rates will be until you receive an email a month or so before renewal. This is where you really need to read the fine print. You can also just renew the domain name rate and move the hosting elsewhere.

Blue Host does have decent customer service with an actual phone number and knowledgeable agents. Namecheap has live chat which is a slow way to correspond but it gets the job done. Also when you log on to your wordpress site you have to do it through a Blue Host link which other services don’t require. Normally you just put in your website name such as xyz.com/wp-admin then input your user name and password for wordpress. Blue Host makes you connect to your website through their service. This probably all sounds a bit confusing. The bottom line is web hosting services don’t want to make it easy to cancel your service. They’re likely hoping you just throw up your hands and keep paying that $445 a year, or more. But it is possible. If you can’t figure it out online call Blue Host customer service and they’ll do it for you.