Before You Cancel Your Old Website Host, Find Out Where Your Email Lives
Cancel the old host first and your company email can go down with the website. Here is the order that keeps both running.
Site Basics
Most contractors who replace an old website want to do one thing the day the new one goes live: cancel the old bill. That is the step that can take your company email down with it.
Your website and your email often share one account
When a host set up your site years ago, they usually set up your domain's records too. Those records tell the internet where your website is and where your email goes. They sit together in one place.
On the Salem build this fall, the domain was registered in 2000. The website was hosted by a company that resold its service through the cable provider, so the invoice said one name and the actual host was another. The company email ran through Microsoft 365, and the records that pointed mail there lived inside that same hosting account.
Cancel the hosting first and two things go dark at once: the old website and every inbox at the company. Nobody would have found out until customers' emails started bouncing.
The order that keeps both running
Copy every record first. Before anything is pointed anywhere, every record in the old account gets copied to a new home. Mail records included.
Point the domain at the new site. Website traffic moves. Email keeps flowing because its records came along.
Check both. Load the site on a phone. Send an email to the company and reply to it.
Then cancel the old host. Not before.
Done in that order, nobody at the shop notices anything except the new site.
Find out who can actually log in
A domain registered twenty years ago is often tied to an email address that belongs to someone who left, or to a login nobody wrote down. That is the real holdup on most handovers, and it is better found out before anyone books a day for it.
Two questions to answer this week, even if you are not replacing anything:
Which company holds your domain, and can you log into that account today?
Where do your email records live, and would cancelling your website host touch them?
If you cannot answer either one, that is worth an hour now. It is much harder to fix on the day something stops working.
This is the same reason I push on ownership. If the domain is in someone else's name, every one of these steps needs their permission. More on that in Whose Name Is on Your Domain.