Reactivating Your Account

You want to come back, and the only question that matters is what is still recoverable, what is already gone, and what it costs to pick it up again. The answer depends entirely on how far down the sequence you got, so this article is organised by the state you are in now rather than by the day you are on. Find yourself in the table below and read that section.

If you want the sequence on the way down, which ladder you were on and which day each stage falls, that is What Happens If You Stop Paying. This is the way back up. Between them they cover the whole sequence, and neither repeats the other.

Which State Are You In

Work down this list and stop at the first row that matches you. Every test is something you can check yourself in the next two minutes, which is the point: the day count is ours, but the state is yours to observe.

How you can tell	Your state	Is anything gone?
You can sign in, and your sites are still serving	Past due	No
Sign-in is refused and tells you the account is suspended	Suspended	No
Sign-in is refused, and you have an email saying your subscription was cancelled	Cancelled, inside the content window	Not yet
You have a letter telling you your content has been deleted	Past the content deadline	Yes
Your email address is not recognised at all, and a password reset finds nothing	Past records retention	Yes, including the account itself

A domain sits outside this table entirely. It is on the registry's clock, not ours, and it can be in trouble while your hosting is perfectly healthy or vice versa. Read Your Domain Is on a Different Clock as well as your own row.

Past Due: Nothing Has Been Lost

This is the state worth staying in, and the only one you can fix entirely by yourself in about a minute.

Nothing has been touched. Your sites serve, your mail flows, you can sign in, and your data is exactly where you left it. There is an unpaid invoice and a countdown behind it, and that is all.

Open Billing, then the subscription, then use Retry payment now. A successful charge clears the arrears, returns the subscription to Active and stops the countdown in the same request.

Saving a card to the account is not the same as paying with it. Adding a payment method charges nothing on its own: no part of the payment-methods screen settles an outstanding invoice. If you add a card and walk away, the countdown keeps running and the next thing you hear is a suspension notice. Attach the card and press Retry payment now in the same sitting.

Suspended: Your Data Is Intact, but the Front Door Is Not

Suspension is a much smaller amount of damage than it feels like, and it is also more awkward to undo than it should be. Both halves of that are worth knowing before you do anything.

What is still there is everything. Suspension does not delete, move or archive anything. Concretely:

Your site's files and databases are untouched. What changed is that the web server was told to answer with a holding page instead of your content. Your content is still sitting behind it.
Your mail is untouched and still being delivered. No part of the non-payment sequence suspends a mailbox or stops mail flowing, so messages sent to you while your website was dark are in your mailbox waiting.
Your DNS, your domain and your certificates are untouched. The holding page deliberately leaves the certificate validation path open, which is why your HTTPS keeps renewing while you are suspended and your site is not broken by an expired certificate when it comes back.
Your backups are where they were, though no new ones are taken while a site is not serving, so the newest backup you have is from the day the suspension started.

What is awkward is reaching us. Account suspension blocks sign-in. The refusal is the whole point of it, but it also sits in front of the page our own suspension notice links you to, so if your session has expired you cannot open the billing screen the email is pointing at.

Do not simply pay an invoice link and wait. Settling the balance and lifting the suspension are two separate steps in our system, and a payment made outside the panel does the first without the second: the money is correctly applied to your invoice, and the account stays suspended until a person clears it. Only the in-panel Retry payment now button does both in one action. If you have already paid this way, nothing is lost and nothing is owed twice. Tell us, and we will clear the suspension.

The route that works, in order:

Try signing in first. If you still have a session, or your sign-in goes through, open Billing, then the subscription, then Retry payment now. This is the one action that settles the invoice and lifts the suspension together, and your sites come back on their own a few minutes later, once the job that puts holding pages up and takes them down next runs. This is the "restored within minutes" your suspension email promised, and it is true for this route.
If sign-in is refused, ask us to lift the suspension before you pay anything. This is the step people get the wrong way round. We restore your access, you sign in, and then you use Retry payment now, which settles the invoice and brings the sites back in one action. Reaching us takes one message and there are three ways to send it:
- Reply to the suspension email. It comes from our billing address, replies to it reach us, and the email itself invites the reply. This is the fastest route, because the thread already identifies your account.
- Write to support@kapsulehost.com from the address on the account. Mail from an address we recognise is matched to your account automatically and raises a ticket.
- Use the contact form at kapsulehost.com/contact if you no longer have access to the mailbox on the account. It needs no sign-in, but it cannot tell who you are, so name your account and one of your domains in the message.

Whichever you use, say four things: the account name, a domain on it, that you want to settle the balance, and whether you have already paid. That is everything we need to act on it without a second exchange.

If you came here from the sign-in page, it tells you to contact support without saying where, and the holding page on your own website links to a billing screen it will not let you open. The three routes above are the ones that reach a person without a sign-in. Any of them is fine.

Do not wait for the cancellation date while you try to get in. Everything above stays true right up until the subscription is cancelled, and considerably less of it is true afterwards.

When your account comes back, check that your site is actually serving again rather than assuming it. If the panel lets you in but a site is still showing the holding page, tell us in the same conversation and we will clear it.

Cancelled: Inside the Content Window

Once the subscription is cancelled, three things change at once, and the third is the one people miss.

Paying is no longer the fix. There is no live invoice to retry, because the subscription that raised it has ended. Coming back means buying a plan again and putting your sites back onto it.

Your content is still there, and now it is on a clock. A cancellation for non-payment puts the account into exactly the same closure pipeline a voluntary account closure uses. That pipeline deletes your hosting content 30 days after the cancellation, and it deletes the records we hold about you 12 months after it. You were emailed both of those dates when the closure was scheduled, so the fastest thing you can do right now is find that email: it names your deadline exactly, and no answer we can give you in a ticket is more precise than the one already in your inbox.

You almost certainly cannot stop it yourself. The panel has a control that cancels a scheduled closure, and if you got here by closing your own account deliberately, while paid up, you can still sign in and use it. If you got here through non-payment you cannot, because the suspension flag set earlier in the sequence is still on the account and it still blocks sign-in. The control exists, it works, and it is behind a door you cannot open. This is the one stage of the whole sequence that needs a person, so contact us rather than working at it.

The deletion only runs on an account with nothing else live on it. If you still have a domain registered with us, or another service you are still paying for, the closure was refused rather than scheduled and the content deletion has not run at all. That is a real reprieve and it is not one you should rely on: it was not designed as an extension, nobody promised it to you, and the moment the last live thing leaves the account the clock can start. Treat it as a reason to contact us today rather than a reason to relax.

What you should do, in one message: tell us your account name, say that you want to come back, and say which sites and mailboxes matter. Reach us the same three ways as above, by replying to any of the emails we sent you, by writing to support@kapsulehost.com from the address on the account, or through kapsulehost.com/contact. What can be saved is saved by acting inside the window, and that window is the only thing in this article we cannot extend by choice.

Past the Content Deadline

Your sites, your files, your databases, your mailboxes and your forwarders have been permanently deleted. They were handed to the same deletion machinery your own delete buttons use, there is no recovery step behind it, and there is no version of this conversation in which we get them back for you. We are not being cautious here, and asking a second time will not produce a different answer.

You will have been sent a letter naming what was deleted. That letter is written from what was actually confirmed gone rather than from what was scheduled, so it is the accurate record of what happened to your account.

What survives this point is not your hosting: it is the paperwork. Invoices, orders and payments are kept for seven years, because tax law requires it.

Coming back from here means starting again. That is a real thing you can do, and if you have a copy of your site anywhere, an export, an old local checkout, a copy your developer kept, we can help you put it back up. See Migrating Your Website to Kapsule.

Past Records Retention

12 months after the closure, the account itself is anonymised. Your name, contact details, credentials, sessions, support conversations and assistant history are removed, and the email address you used to sign in is replaced with a placeholder.

The practical effect is the one you have probably already discovered: your address is not recognised on the sign-in page and a password reset finds nothing to reset, because there is no longer an account with your address on it. Nothing is wrong with your typing. There is nothing there.

There is also nothing to recover, restore or reopen, and no ticket that changes that. If you want to host with us again you are a new customer, and you are very welcome to be one. Start at Getting Started with KapsuleHost.

Your Domain Is on a Different Clock

Read this even if your hosting story ended years ago, because a domain can still be saveable when nothing else is.

Your domain is a registration held at the registry that runs the extension. The 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 for you.

That is why it is the one thing in this article that settling a hosting invoice does not fix. After expiry the registry moves the name 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. A name in the recovery period also cannot be transferred to another registrar until it is restored.

If your domain has expired, deal with it before anything else in this article, and open a ticket today rather than at the weekend. Every other deadline here belongs to us and we have some discretion about it. This one does not, it is the shortest, and it is the only one that ends with your name belonging to somebody else.

We cannot quote the redemption fee in advance because it is the registry's price and it differs by extension. Ask us and we will find out what yours is and how much of the window is left. See Domain Renewals and Expiry.

What Coming Back Costs

There is no reactivation fee, no reinstatement fee and no penalty for having lapsed. We do not charge for coming back, and nothing in this article costs money except the things you already owed or are buying again.

Your state	What you pay
Past due, or suspended	The outstanding balance. Nothing else
Cancelled	Today's catalogue price for the plan you choose. Some server plans carry a one-time setup fee, shown at checkout before you confirm
Past the content deadline	Whatever you buy as a new customer
Domain in the recovery period	The registry's redemption fee, plus the renewal

The prices you will be quoted are today's prices, not the ones you were on. If your old plan has been repriced or retired since you left, tell us what you were paying and what you need, and we will tell you honestly what the nearest thing is.