What Happens If You Stop Paying

If a payment stops going through, nothing is deleted on the day it fails and nothing is deleted quietly later. There is a published sequence, every step of it sends you an email, and most of it is reversible by paying.

The complication is that Kapsule runs more than one sequence, and which one applies to you depends on facts about your account rather than on what you bought. This article is the whole map. Find your case in Which Ladder Are You On, read that ladder, then read What Each Stage Actually Means, because the word "suspended" covers a much smaller amount of damage than most people assume.

Domains Are on Someone Else's Clock

Read this part even if you read nothing else.

Your domain name is not hosted by us in the way your website is. It is a registration held at the registry that runs the extension, and that registry sets the expiry date, the recovery window and the recovery fee. We are the registrar in the middle. We remind you, we renew it for you, and we cannot pause, extend or reverse the registry's schedule on your behalf.

That difference matters because every other consequence in this article is undone by paying us. A lapsed domain is not. Once a domain passes its expiry date, the registry moves it through its own stages: it stops resolving, it enters a recovery period during which getting it back costs a redemption fee set by the registry rather than the ordinary renewal price, and at the end of that period it is deleted and anyone in the world may register it.

We send domain expiry reminders 60 days, 30 days and 7 days before the expiry date on the registration.

Once a domain is in the registry's redemption period it also cannot be transferred to another registrar until it is restored. Restoring it is a paid action at the registry, and the price is theirs, not ours. If your domain has already expired, open a ticket immediately rather than waiting, because the remaining window is finite and we can tell you exactly how much of it is left.

Which Ladder Are You On

Work down this list and stop at the first one that describes you.

1. You bought your hosting through another company (an agency, a web designer, a reseller) and you pay them, not Kapsule. You are on Ladder E. Your provider sets the length of your own grace period.
2. You were on a free trial that ended and you never paid us anything. You are on Ladder C.
3. You pay an annual invoice by hand (bank transfer or an invoice you settle each year) rather than having a card charged automatically. You are on Ladder D.
4. There is no payment method on your account at all, and a renewal charge has come due. You are on Ladder A, which is the shortest of the paid ladders.
5. A card or PayPal is on file, and a renewal charge has now failed. You are on Ladder B, which gives you roughly twice as long.

The line between Ladder A and Ladder B is whether you have a means of payment on file at all, not whether it works. An expired card, a cancelled card and a card your bank keeps declining are all still a means of payment, and all of them put you on the longer Ladder B. If your card has just expired you are the easiest case to fix, and you get the longer runway rather than the shorter one.

Ladder A is shorter for the opposite reason, and it is not a penalty. If there is no payment method on the account there is nothing for us to retry, so waiting a further two weeks changes nothing on its own. What that account needs is a conversation, and the shorter ladder is what makes sure you get one while the situation is still easy to fix.

Ladder A: No Means of Payment on File

Every day below is counted from the day the charge first came due.

Ladder B: A Means of Payment Is on File

Where a card or a PayPal agreement is on the account, the emails arrive on the same days but the last two stages sit much further out.

Ladder C: A Trial That Ended Without a Payment

A trial that finishes without us ever taking a payment is handled separately, and it is the longest sequence we run. All of these days are counted from the day your trial ended, not from the day you signed up.

The grace window here is 30 days of read-only running before anything is suspended, which is longer than any of the other ladders gives you.

Ladder D: An Annual Invoice You Pay by Hand

Manual annual renewals are not charged automatically, so there is no card to retry and the sequence is shorter. Days are counted from the end of the period you have already paid for.

Your renewal invoice is issued 30 days before the period ends, so by the time this ladder starts you have already had a month's notice.

Ladder E: An Account Bought Through a Reseller

If another company sells you your hosting, they own the billing relationship and they set the grace period. The default is 7 days from the failed payment, but your provider may set it anywhere from 1 to 90 days, so the only reliable answer is the one on the notice they send you.

There is no automatic cancellation stage on this ladder. A suspended reseller-managed account stays suspended until the balance is settled or your provider intervenes. Pay your provider, not Kapsule: we cannot take a payment for an invoice that is not ours, and settling with them is what lifts the suspension.

What Each Stage Actually Means

These four words describe four very different situations, and the differences are the reason this article exists.

Read-only is a marker on the account, not an outage. Your sites serve, your mail flows, your data is untouched and you can still sign in. It exists to give you a window to put a payment method on the account.

Suspended is the one that surprises people, in both directions. Sites on the affected subscription serve a calm holding page instead of your content, and the page tells search engines not to index it, so a short suspension does not cost you your rankings. Nothing is deleted and your domain is still registered to you. Your HTTPS certificates keep renewing on purpose, so the site is not broken by an expired certificate when it comes back. But account suspension also means the login page refuses you, so you cannot sign in to the panel while it lasts.

Two things about backups are worth knowing before you let a suspension run. Nightly backups are only taken from sites that are serving, so no new backup is taken while you are suspended and the newest one you have is from the day it started. And restoring a backup is refused while the suspension is for money owed, so a suspension is not a window in which you can quietly recover an old version of the site. Settle first, then restore.

Cancelled means the subscription itself has ended. There is no longer an invoice to retry, so paying is no longer the fix: buying the plan again is. Anything that was provisioned under that subscription has to be provisioned again. Your content still exists at this point, but it is now on a deadline.

Deleted is the end of the deletion clock described below, and it is the only stage in this article that cannot be undone by anyone, including us.

What Reverses Each Stage, and What Does Not

Before suspension: paying fixes everything, immediately and by itself. Add or update the card, attach it to the subscription, and use Retry payment now on the subscription page. A successful charge returns the subscription to Active, clears the suspension flag, restores full account access and lifts the holding page from your sites. No ticket, no waiting for a human.

At suspension: paying still fixes everything, but you may not be able to reach the button. A successful payment restores the account and brings the sites back on their own, usually within a few minutes. The catch is that account suspension blocks sign-in, so if your session has expired you cannot get into the panel to pay. If you are suspended and locked out, email support@kapsulehost.com from the address on the account. Do not wait for the cancellation date while trying to get in.

After cancellation: paying does not restore the subscription. You are buying the plan again, and re-provisioning what was on it. Your files, databases and mailboxes are still there for a limited time, so the sooner you contact us the more of the original setup can be saved.

After the content deletion date: nothing reverses it. The deletion runs through the same doors your own delete buttons use, and there is no recovery step behind it.

A lapsed domain is not reversed by paying us at all. See the section at the top. That clock belongs to the registry.

After Cancellation: the Deletion Clock

Every ladder above ends in the same place. When a subscription is cancelled for non-payment, the account enters the same closure pipeline that a voluntary account closure uses, and you get an email naming the exact dates.

• Your hosting content is deleted 30 days after the cancellation. That means sites, files, databases, mailboxes, forwarders and backups. Up to that date the closure is still cancellable and you can stop it from the panel or by contacting us.
• The records we hold about you are deleted 12 months after the cancellation. That is your name, contact details, credentials, support conversations and assistant history.
• Invoices, orders and payments are kept for seven years, as tax law requires, with no person attached to them.

Troubleshooting

I was suspended earlier than the date in my email. Check whether the email was about a different subscription. Each subscription has its own invoice, its own dates and its own ladder, so one can lapse while the others are current.

I added a card and I am still suspended. Saving a card to the account is not the same as attaching it to the subscription, and neither one settles the outstanding invoice. Open the subscription, confirm the Renewal Card panel shows your card, then use Retry payment now. See What Happens When a Payment Fails.

I cannot sign in to pay. That is account suspension working as designed, and it is the one part of this sequence that needs a human. Email support from the address on the account.

My trial ended but I was told I had 30 days. You do, if you never paid us anything: that is Ladder C and suspension is at day 31. If you had already paid us at least once for that subscription, it is a failed renewal rather than an expired trial, and it runs on Ladder A.

Nothing arrived by email. Billing notices go to the billing address on the account, which is often not the address you log in with. Check it under Billing, then Billing details, and check spam. Billing email cannot be switched off, so if none arrived the address is wrong.

I want to stop rather than fix it. Cancel properly instead of letting a ladder cancel you: it ends cleanly on a date you choose. See Cancelling Your Plan and Closing Your Account.

If you are past any of these dates, or you are not sure which ladder applies to you, email support@kapsulehost.com with your account name. Tell us the date rather than asking whether it is too late: the answer depends entirely on which stage you have reached.