Before You Cancel
Six questions to answer for every account before you close it, so nothing else goes down with it.
Want help applying this to your business? Get in touch and tell me which accounts you're thinking of closing.
The account I almost closed on schedule
In September I moved my website to a cheaper host. The plan was simple. Move the site, then cancel the old host, because as far as I knew the website was the only thing it did for me.
It was doing more than that. The old host was quietly answering for two other domains I'd forgotten about, and cancelling it on schedule would have taken both of them off the internet. The next provider I wanted to close was holding the records for an email account I still use. Three saved logins in my password manager were using an old email address that had stopped working years ago, and one of them was a payment account. And the date I'd planned the cancellation around turned out to be the wrong date.
None of that showed up in the account I was closing. So when it all turned up, my reaction was basically panic. I'm glad I had AI walking me through the checks, because the deadline in my notes was wrong and I'd have trusted it.
So I turned those checks into this worksheet. It's six questions for every account you're about to close, and you answer all six before you press Cancel.
Move first, cancel last. Answer the six questions and move whatever depends on the account somewhere else. Only then press Cancel, before the paid time runs out.
A domain lives in two places
This is the part that caught me out. Every domain has a registrar, which is the company you pay for the name. It also has a DNS host, which is basically the company whose servers tell the world where your website and email live.
Microsoft's own help page on this says the two are "often the same company, but they can be different." For three of my domains they were different. So a domain can be registered somewhere perfectly safe and still stop working the day you close an account it was quietly pointing at.
The account you're closing will only show you its own stuff. My old host's dashboard showed my website. It showed nothing about the two domains registered at other companies that depended on it.
The worksheet
Copy this block once for each domain the account touches. If the host you're leaving answers for three domains, that's three blocks. Fill in every line before you cancel anything.
ACCOUNT I'M CLOSING: [the host, registrar, email provider or website builder]
DOMAIN: [yourbusiness.com]
1. WHO HOLDS IT? Registrar: [ ]
2. WHO ANSWERS FOR IT? Name servers: [ ]
Do they belong to the account I'm closing? YES / NO
3. WHAT'S LIVE ON IT? Website: YES / NO Email: YES / NO
4. WHAT LOGS IN WITH AN ADDRESS ON IT? [every saved login that uses @yourbusiness.com]
5. THE TWO DATES. Next charge: [ ] Paid time ends: [ ]
Cancel before: [the date the paid time ends]
6. ANY MAIL SENT TO IT IN THE LAST TWO YEARS? YES / NO
SAFE TO CANCEL WHEN: question 2 says NO, anything live in 3 or 6 has moved, every login in 4 uses a working address and today is before the date in 5.
Where to find each answer
In my experience none of these need a technical background. The first two come off one free page.
| Question | Where to look | What goes wrong if you skip it |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Who holds it? | ICANN Lookup. Type the domain and read the Registrar line. | If the account you're closing is the registrar, the domain can expire along with it. Move the domain out first. |
| 2. Who answers for it? | The same ICANN page, the Name Servers lines. The company's name is usually right there in them. | If those servers belong to the account you're closing, the domain stops working the day you close it, website and email both, wherever it's registered. |
| 3. What's live on it? | Open the domain in a browser. For email, run an MX lookup at MXToolbox. | You switch off a website or an inbox that nobody told you was still running. |
| 4. What logs in with an address on it? | Search your password manager for the domain name. Look hardest at anything to do with money, and at the registrar itself. | When the mailbox dies, any password reset sent there goes nowhere. Three of my saved logins were already in that state. |
| 5. The two dates? | The vendor's billing page, never your notes. Write down the next charge date and the date the paid time ends. | You plan around the charge date. My old host charged 15 days early, so the date in my notes was the wrong one. |
| 6. Mail in the last two years? | Search the inbox that domain's mail lands in. In Gmail that's: to:yourbusiness.com newer_than:2y | Nothing in two years usually means nobody uses it. Anything arriving means the email moves before anything else does. |
What it found when I ran it
None of these was visible from the account I was closing.
| What I checked | What turned up |
|---|---|
| Who answers for my domains | Two old domains were using the host I was closing. Cancelling on schedule would have taken both off the internet. |
| The next provider on my list | It was answering for a domain with live Google email on it. Close it first and that mail stops arriving, while Google keeps billing for the mailbox. |
| Saved logins | Three still used an address that had died years ago. One was a payment account. |
| The bill | It charged the renewal 15 days before the new month started. I cancelled one day before the paid time ran out, and the $34.99 it had already charged is being refunded. |
| An inbox search | A mailbox I'd been paying $191.76 for, two years at a time, had received nothing. I cancelled that too. |
Nothing went dark. No domain dropped off, no email stopped arriving and nobody got locked out, because I moved or fixed every one of these before closing the account it depended on.
The order that keeps everything working
- Fill in a block for every domain the account touches.
- Move anything that depends on the account somewhere else: the name servers, the email records and the domain itself if the account is its registrar.
- Look each domain up on ICANN again and check that nothing still points at the old account.
- Change every login that uses an address you're about to lose.
- Cancel against the date the paid time ends. The next charge date doesn't decide anything here.
One more thing to look for
While checking the registrar I was leaving, AI found invoices in my email from a phone company that turned out to be part of the same corporate family. It was the toll-free number for one of my old brands, still billing every month. Closing the main account first could have taken the number with it, so the number moves first.
Search your inbox for the vendor's name on invoices from other companies too. Sister companies bill under their own names, so a phone line or an email service can sit behind a name you don't recognise.
About Andrew Voskov
Andrew Voskov is the founder of Cherry Pi AI. This worksheet came out of moving his own website, domains and email off two providers in September 2026, where he found every problem on this page before cancelling anything.
If you're about to close an account and want a second pair of eyes on what depends on it, get in touch. Tell me which account and what's on it.
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