Sometimes you may need to take a career break or you may not want your site to be not bring in the calls and emails as you are not able to take any more business. Normally the first response it to take down the website and / or stop the hosting, this is nearly always the wrong thing to do, in situations that you cant take any more work we suggest putting a message on the site to indicate this and you can even disable your contact form and remove your phone number as you will not benefit from domain aging and ‘trust’ from the search engines, if you take your site up and down regularly to suit your circumstances.
This recent exchange with a website owner demonstrates this
[Website Owner] Over the last 6 months I have been re-designing all of my website Ideas. I have also been doing market research and general business research for my ecommerce website as this is the main and biggest project and needs the most investment. As I am still working full time, this is taking longer than I would like, however I am getting there. Until I have finished all my design and research work, I would like my websites to be switched off please. I am not using them, nor advertising them at the moment, and therefore I think they should be closed.
The reason I wished to switch the websites off is because I didn’t want to rake up a large hosting bill. I haven’t really used the websites properly yet and I didn’t want to payout loads for something I am not using.
[Delicious Webdesign] In General The last thing you should do to a website, if you have any plans to use it in the future, is turn it off (or put it offline) This is because you have started to build up a bit of trust with Google / Bing and Yahoo and they now know about your site and have now indexed you. You can remove it but the search engines will remove you from their index you and put you ‘trust’ back a bit. As your website aren’t major ones ones and are barely getting any visitors currently I would say its better for you just to leave them online, perhaps putting a message up saying something like ‘Not taking on new projects until further notice’
Hosting is paid if they are on or off, they still need to be on a server, your domains are paid up until the end of September and after that we charge £45 per domain per year for hosting / email / support. Its MUCH more advantageous to keep them hosted and live if you have any intentions of using them in the future than taking them down just to save a relatively small amount of money. Additionally if we stop hosting them and the domain name could be bought by someone else.
