For most closed businesses, the cash cost of keeping a website online is small. The real cost is the risk that comes with a site nobody looks after: software that stops getting security updates, a hack that turns your old brand into a liability, and a renewal notice sent to a mailbox nobody reads. Each of those can wipe out what the site is worth in a few weeks.
This guide sets out the bills, the risks and the alternative, so you can decide whether to keep paying, let it go or hand it over.
What does a dead website actually cost to keep online?
There are three cash costs: the domain renewal, the hosting and any paid software such as premium plugins, themes or a site builder subscription. None of them stop when the business does.
Prices vary widely by provider and setup, so treat this as an illustration rather than a statistic: suppose a basic shared hosting plan plus a .com renewal comes to somewhere around $10 to $30 a month combined. A store left on a paid ecommerce platform plan, with apps still subscribed, can easily cost several times that. Your own bank statement is the only number that matters, so add up the last twelve months of charges linked to the site.
| Cost item | How it is billed | What happens if you stop |
|---|---|---|
| Domain renewal | Yearly, at your registrar | Domain expires, then goes to auction or drops |
| Hosting | Monthly or yearly | Site goes offline, pages fall out of search |
| Platform plan (Shopify, Wix, etc.) | Monthly | Store closes or is paused |
| Premium plugins and themes | Yearly licence | Updates stop, security holes stay open |
| Your time | Unpaid | Nobody notices problems until it is too late |
The last row is the one owners forget. A site that “runs itself” is really a site that nobody is watching.
Why outdated software is the biggest hidden cost
Most small business sites run on WordPress or a similar system, with a theme and a stack of plugins. Each piece gets security fixes for as long as its developer maintains it and you install the updates. When the business closes, updates usually stop, and every month adds more known weaknesses.
Automated tools scan the web for those weaknesses all day. They do not care whether your site gets ten visits or ten thousand. A dormant site with an old contact form plugin or an abandoned theme is exactly what they look for.
Updating is not always simple either. A plugin skipped for two years may break the site when updated, which is why many owners stop touching it altogether. That is understandable, and it is also how small problems become large ones.
What a hack does to an old website
A hacked site rarely shows a dramatic message on the homepage. More often, someone quietly adds hidden pages, redirects some visitors to unrelated sites or injects code that only search engines see. You may only find out when a former customer mentions it or when your browser starts showing warnings.
The damage goes beyond the clean-up bill. Search engines may start showing the injected pages under your brand name. The authority links you earned from press, suppliers and associations now point at something you would not want associated with your name. And from a buyer’s point of view, a hacked site is a different asset. We do not take on penalized or hacked sites, and many other buyers are just as wary, because the risk is hard to measure.
There is a quieter risk too. An old store or booking system may still hold customer names, addresses and order histories in its database. If an unpatched site is breached, that becomes a data protection problem for you as the former owner, not just a technical one. If you no longer need those records, ask an adviser how long you must keep them, then delete or archive them securely. This is general information, not legal advice.
If you suspect a hack, check Search Console for security warnings and look at which pages Google has indexed with a site: search. Our 10-point checklist for closed business websites covers the basic checks.
The renewal date: the cost that arrives all at once
Hosting problems build slowly. Domain expiry happens on a single day. Under ICANN’s expired registration rules, your registrar has to warn you at least twice before expiry, roughly a month and a week out. If those emails go to an address tied to the closed business, nobody sees them.
What follows depends on the registrar. In GoDaddy’s published timeline, the site and email stop working around day 5 after expiry, the domain leaves your account around day 18 with a redemption fee to get it back, and it is listed on GoDaddy’s expired domain auction around day 26. At that point someone else can win your old name, together with the links and search history attached to it.
We explain the full sequence in what happens to a website’s authority when the domain expires. The short version: renew early and switch on auto-renew with a card that will not expire.
How a dead site loses value even when nothing breaks
Even without a hack or an expiry, a neglected site loses ground. Pages with outdated prices, closed opening hours or broken checkout flows send visitors back to the search results. Over months, rankings drift down and some pages drop out of the index. Organic traffic that once came in steadily starts to thin.
Authority links last longer, because the sites that linked to you usually leave those links in place. But they only count if they point at a working page. Every month a site spends broken or offline is a month in which that earned trust is doing nothing for anyone.
The alternative: let the site pay you instead
If your old site still meets a few basic tests, it may be worth more as an asset than as a cost. We look for sites that are still indexed, get at least 500 monthly organic visits as estimated by Ahrefs, have at least two or three strong authority links, still rank for their own brand name and can be transferred by the owner.
For those sites, our preferred route is lease-to-own: roughly $300 to $500 per month per site, paid monthly until the agreed price is paid in full. We take over hosting, renewals and upkeep from day one, so the bills in the table above stop being yours. Outright cash purchase is possible for the right asset, though the monthly route pays a higher total than our cash offer. Everything is set out in a written agreement before any transfer.
To compare this with doing nothing, see keeping a website on autopilot vs leasing it and letting your website expire vs leasing it.
Not every site should be kept, though. If it has no meaningful traffic, no links from respected sites and no business history behind it, the honest answer may be to export what you want to keep and let it lapse. If you plan to restart the business, keeping it running and patched makes sense even with no return.
The decision is easier with numbers in front of you. Our free website value check gives a quick verdict based on traffic, links and indexation.
What to do next
- Add up the last twelve months of charges linked to the site and note the domain’s renewal date.
- Update or replace outdated plugins and themes, or move the site to a static copy if updates keep breaking it.
- If the site still has traffic and authority links, send us your site for a free valuation before the next bill arrives.
Frequently asked questions
Is it worth paying to keep my old business website online?
It depends on what the site still has. If it is indexed, still gets organic visits and has links from respected sites, keeping it online preserves an asset that can be sold or leased. If it has no traffic and no links, the money and attention are probably better spent elsewhere. Check the numbers with free tools such as the Ahrefs traffic checker before deciding either way.
What happens if I just stop paying for hosting?
The site goes offline but the domain stays registered until its renewal date. Visitors and search engines start finding errors, and pages that used to rank begin to drop out of results over time. The authority links pointing at the site now lead to a dead page. If the domain then expires too, someone else can register or win it at auction, and the history goes with it.
Can an old WordPress site really get hacked if nobody visits it?
Yes. Automated scanners look for known weaknesses in old plugins, themes and core versions across the whole internet, whether a site is popular or not. A dormant site that has not been updated in a year or two is an easy target. Once hacked, it can serve hidden pages or malware under your brand name, and a hacked site is much harder to sell or lease.
Is there a cheaper way to keep the site alive without maintaining it myself?
You can move it to a static copy on low-cost hosting, which removes most plugin risk, but you still have to renew the domain and watch for problems. The other route is handing the work to someone else. With our lease-to-own model we take over hosting, renewals and upkeep from day one, and you receive a monthly payment rather than paying the bills.
Find out what your website is worth before it expires.
Send us the site in about a minute. We check index status, organic traffic, authority links and history, then come back with a cash offer, a monthly lease-to-own option, or a plain no.
Get my free website valuation →