Web Design – Closing Down Your Website

There are situations when for one reason or another, a client who has engaged our web design and web hosting services will decide to close down their own business. This may be down to economic realities or personal reasons of their own.

This policy represents your web design agreement with Websites Are Us, in addition to all emails exchanged between us and yourselves. Please retain your emails for future reference in the unlikely event of any dispute. This policy is in addition to our
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Web Design > Closing A Website
From time to time, we may have to revise the policies on our web design terms and conditions. Any changes or updates to these policies are normally minor and do not affect the overall agreement between both parties. However, please always make sure you do check back on this page regularly for updates.

Closing down your website and/or hosting

There are situations when for one reason or another, a client who has engaged our web design and web hosting services will decide to close down their own business. This may be down to economic realities or personal reasons of their own. When a client decides to close down their business, there is always a transition process – a period of time when you may still have contractual obligations to fulfil or stock to sell. Your customers may not want to see a BLANK PAGE suddenly where a website once was. When you go out of business, what do you do with your website and/or web hosting?

For the avoidance of any doubt, we have published this page which outlines the key procedures and points concerning closure of the website and/or web hosting.

Closing down the website

To safeguard our clients, and ourselves, we have outlined the procedure(s) involved, and in what order they would take place.

1 Telling us about closing the website –
1.1 We can ONLY ACCEPT your instructions in writing. Even if you phone us, you will be asked to send us an email confirming that you wish to close down your website, or terminate the design project, or close down the web hosting.
1.2 We will then email you back, and either provide a website link that you need to complete the authorisation to close down whichever service(s) you wish terminated or if we are satisfied that the instructions are clear, carry on with the closing down procedures.
1.3 A website close down can take up to 14 days to complete. Where possible we aim to close down a website quicker, but there may be outstanding payments or matters to deal with before the website is fully closed down.

2 We retain the full rights to resell the website and/or domain name –
2.1 If you have simply decided to close down the website with no intention of carrying on in that particular business, then we may decide to resell or re-use the website files and/or domain name without any need to obtain further permission from yourself.
2.2 If we do resell or re-use the website and/or domain name, then we have no obligation whatsoever to make any payment(s) to you.
2.3 If you wish to KEEP THE DOMAIN NAME then you will need to pay any associated renewal costs in advance. Otherwise, we reserve the right then to resell the domain name to another third party.
2.4 There are NO REFUNDS for any outstanding service(s) that you may have paid for in advance.
Turning off the services

These are the key step(s) we will take in closing down your website and/or web hosting plus any other services.

Close down 3rd party services

We will close down or terminate any third party services. This may include statistics software, Google Analytics, tracking programs, advertisements. If YOU have any services or recurring payments associated with this website/account or email address, you should make sure these are cancelled. If there are services or clients that may need to contact you in the future, you should ensure they have an up to date email address or contact information.

Switch off email services and control panel access

Any email accounts and control panel access will be switched off. Email accounts will be deleted, and any emails on the system will be deleted without any requirement on our part to make any backups of these emails.

Backup of current website

We will make a backup of the current website as it is at the time of closing down. If you would like a backup copy then there will be a fee to pay. Please contact us about this. Backups are for our own records only.

Delete all files from the server and close down

The procedure of closing down the website is to switch off all email accounts, delete any mailboxes, FTP accounts, and finally the website itself. When we have done this, we may point the domain name to any website or other domain we choose to.

Changes to our close down policy

Websites Are Us and their server providers reserve the right to add, delete, or modify any provision of these ‘Closing Down Procedures’ at any time without notice.
Failure to receive notification of a change does not make those changes invalid.