How to deactivate in 2019

The FTP errors and suspendeddomain.org redirects are a known problem. There are dozens of topics about it already, in-depth descriptions are available here: 404 Errors, suspendeddomain.org, FTP errors

Previously, you could deactivate an account. Internally, it would be marked as “suspended” and the account would be shut down and deleted some time after 90 days, as was common at the time. This cleanup would be run regularly to clean up server space for active accounts.

Both then and now, it was possible to not touch an account and, if it didn’t get any traffic, would be deleted after 30 days. Yes, not doing anything would cause your account to be deleted faster than if you deactivated it.

Meanwhile, iFastNet hasn’t run a cleanup run in half a year or so. Thanks to the new storage system, they don’t have to worry about disk space anymore, so they don’t have to run a cleanup. That means that accounts which were deactivated in June 2018 have still not been deleted.

Most people who deactivate their accounts want to delete them. But right now, deactivated accounts are effectively prevented from being deleted.

So, instead, the Deactivate button was removed. So you can just delete the domains from the account and leave it active, so it will be deleted for inactivity after 30 days.

I know that this is not what people want, people want a button to delete their accounts instead. But with the way things are now, the best way to do that is probably a “placebo button” which causes some visual change without actually deactivating the account.

And before anyone starts complaining that in doing so we’re dishonest, keep in mind that this way you can delete accounts faster than when you still had a working deactivation button.