I was asked by a visitor whether "deleting a website" prevents the files on it from being accessed over the Internet. "Or do I have to delete the files, PDFs and documents on that website before deleting the site, in order to make the files inaccessible?" she asked. This article addresses that question.
It depends on what you mean by "deleting a website".
If you mean that you want to cancel your account at your web host and stop paying future months' bills for that account after the current term expires, then it's probably true that your site will no longer be available when accessed by a web browser after that date. Since the contract was that the web host provides its services for your site in exchange for a fee, when you terminate the contract and stop paying, the services end.
This doesn't mean that your files are necessarily deleted from their computers. It just means that when your visitor types your domain name into their web browser, they will no longer arrive at your site (once the web host gets around to configuring their system to no longer deliver your site's pages). If that's the only aspect you are concerned about, then your job is done.
If you did not manually delete the files on your web host's computer, they will probably be deleted anyway when dead accounts are removed to make space for new customers. This gets rid of the copy on the active hard disk it was originally stored. However, if your web host was a good one, they will also probably have backups of your website located somewhere. (Web hosts make backups of the sites hosted with them so that when the hard disk containing a site fails, they can replace it and restore the site onto the new disk from the backup.) The copy of your site in these backups will probably still continue to exist for a while, until such time it is overwritten with newer backups of their system. How long this takes depends on the frequency of their backups and how many months' worth of backups they keep on standby.
Some social media sites provide a way for you to customize your personal (or company's) public-facing page (or pages) on their service. This leads to a lot of people and companies treating these pages as their websites, since they have no other. (As an aside, I personally don't think that using a social media site as your main website is a good idea for a business, since your online presence will now wholly depend on their existence/survival, features and rules. I think that it's far better to get your own domain name and set up a normal website. You can always have a social media account, but don't rely on it as your business' primary Internet presence.)
The question of whether deleting your social media account will lead to your data no longer being available or even actually removed is a tricky one that no outsider (other than the social media platform's employees and owners) can answer with confidence. I mean, it's not like the more famous social media sites have proven themselves to be paragons of virtue. They, along with certain other big famous Internet companies, are known to be hungry for data on which they feed voraciously and give away or use for profit, often without your knowing. And even if everyone acted with great integrity and purity of heart, we still have to contend with bugs in their software. A website on those platforms is not the same as a normal website on a web host. Their systems are huge and complicated, and as such, are guaranteed to contain bugs. Such bugs may inadvertently expose your data, even those that are supposed to have been deleted ages ago.
As such, if you are asking whether deleting an account at a social media website will remove your "website" and data stored there, I cannot give a definitive answer. You should look up the documentation on their site to see what the official word is. But as mentioned above, even if deleting means that your pages are no longer accessible on the Internet, it doesn't guarantee that some bug in the future will not suddenly resurrect your site. These things have happened before, and will probably do so again.
If by "deleting your website" you mean to cancel your domain at your registrar, you are seriously going about this the wrong way. I can't imagine anyone thinking of using this as a solution, but over the years of running thesitewizard.com and receiving umpteen visitor queries and comments, I've come to realise that anything is possible, so I guess I ought to address this as well, just in case.
Let me say it bluntly, so that there's no misunderstanding. Do not cancel your domain as a way of deleting your website. It won't work the way you think. Actually, I can't think of a reason why anyone ever needs to cancel a domain at all. As I mentioned before elsewere, if you don't want a domain any more, just stop renewing it and it will expire on its own. Those who are confused by this paragraph because you don't know the difference between a web host and a domain registrar, please read the article linked to here.
In any case, even if you cancel your domain, you will still need to terminate your web hosting account. Otherwise your web host will keep billing you, and your site will continue to exist. In fact, even without the domain name, your site will still be reachable on the Internet via its IP address.
If you're wondering what an IP address is, it's the underlying numeric address of your website. You and I may see a site via its human-friendly domain name, but the machines on the Internet actually use sequences of numbers like 127.0.0.1 as addresses. The various software that comprise the Internet work together to transparently translate domain names into the underlying IP address, so that humans don't have to deal with an unmemorable and unfriendly sequence of digits like 127.0.0.1.
When you peremptorily delete a domain without cancelling your web hosting account, all you will do is remove the human readable address. It's like trying to close a shop in the brick and mortar world by removing the shop sign, but not actually physically closing its doors or moving out. People can still walk into it.
Before you delete anything, back up your website on your own computer. You should do this even if you don't think you will ever want to resurrect your site. Otherwise, if you have a change of heart in the future, or find that you want to reuse something that you have worked on in the past, the next question you'll end up asking me, years down the line, is "Can I recover my files from a website discontinued a long time ago?"
Don't just back up the files. If your site uses a database, as it may if it is a blog or if it runs on a content management system (CMS), make sure that you back that up too. See my article on How to Back up a Website if you are not sure how to do any of these things.
Once you're sure you want to get rid of your website, the first thing to do before cancelling your account is to delete your data. If you cancel your account first, depending on the service you use (that is, how immature and amateurish the people running it are and whether they throw a tantrum), you may lose all access immediately and cannot delete anything.
After you delete your data, test it by using a browser to access your site and the various files that you're worried about. You should encounter an empty directory, your web host's placeholder page, a File Not Found error or some other error.
Look for your web host's account cancellation page. Do not do it by simply halting future payments. That is not the correct way to terminate an account. The web host may just think that you are slow in paying that month or something, and continue to maintain your account and bill you. Use the method that the web host provides to inform them that you wish to cancel it.
If your web host is a professionally-run business, your site will probably only disappear after the expiry of your term. That is, if you have already paid up for the month, and you're cancelling for next month onwards, your web host will continue to make your website available on the Internet (albeit in its now empty state, since you have deleted everything yourself in the first step), and provide you the normal access you had before, until the end of the month.
If your site is archived by the Internet Archive, a copy of your files will continue to be stored in their library since their intention is to preserve Internet history for sites that allow them to do so. If this is not desirable, for example, your site contained information that you now realise should not have been publicly available in the first place (eg, you inadvertently disclosed your home address, and you now find that you're regularly contacted by innumerable Nigerian princes eager to share with you their fortune), you can write to them to ask that your site be removed.
Otherwise, the above procedure should be sufficient to get rid of your site on a normal web host. But remember, as I said earlier, if you're talking about a profile page or some other set of pages placed on a social media site, whether the above is successful or not depends on that service, and whether your data continues to exist in some dark corner of their system, waiting to be resurrected on a whim.
Copyright © 2018-2020 Christopher Heng. All rights reserved.
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Does Deleting a Website Remove Access to the Files on It?
