You wake up Monday morning to discover the message “Your account has been suspended” on your website.
Uh oh. What happened?
You didn’t make any changes to your site over the weekend.
Hmmm. You remember visiting your site last night; the pages displayed without any problem. What do you do next? Where do you start?
Reasons Your Site Is Suspended
First, you need to understand the cause of the message, so you can take action and get your site back online as quickly as possible.
There are many reasons a website is suspended, including:
Lack of Payment
One of the most common reasons a site is suspended is due to lack of payment for web hosting.
Hosts try to avoid billing issues by sending out email notices to clients ahead of time or setting up automatic payments from customer credit/debit cards.
If you’ve changed your email address or have filters set on your email account, you may have missed the notice. Check your spam folder for web host messages.
Also, if your credit card or debit card has expired or you no longer use that card, the billing won’t go through.
To get your site back up and running:
- Contact your web host or log in to your web host account
- Confirm your payment options are correct
- Make a payment
Depending on your host, your site will be back online quickly.
Server Performance
If you’re on shared web hosting, and your site is slowing down the performance of other sites on the same server, your account may be suspended by your web host.
Your web host has likely sent you an email message detailing the problem with recommendations for how to resolve the issue.
Web hosting plans have limits on usage, you’ll want to review what the limits are for your plan.
There are several reasons your site might be using more server resources:
- Did you implement a new application on your site?
- Add a new plugin that requires more server resources?
- If the site is running on PHP, check that you’re using the most current version
Talk with your web host about options; you might need to change to a different web hosting plan or a different web host.
Policy Violation
If you’ve violated the policies of the web host, your account will be suspended. Your account may have been flagged for spam, a copyright violation, or some other policy.
Contact your web host. Ask for more details, and get a better understanding of the policy, and how you can resolve it.
Summary
Seeing an account suspension message on your website can be a frustrating experience, but it’s a situation you can control.
Get in touch with your web host as quickly as possible to learn the reason behind the suspension message. By knowing the cause, you can take action to resolve the issue, and get your site back up quickly.
Can’t get your website account suspension resolved? Resolving an account suspended message takes time, knowing what initial questions to ask, and following up.
Getting help from someone with experience may be the fastest way to get your site back up and running quickly.
Original published: September 14, 2015, updated August 6, 2018
