Suspend or unsuspend an account in WHM

October 22, 2026 · 3 min read · Markdown

If you resell hosting, you will sometimes need to take a customer's account offline without deleting it: an unpaid invoice, an abuse complaint, or a site the owner has asked you to park. Suspending the account blocks access and stops the site and email from working, but every file, database and mailbox stays where it is, so you can switch it back on later.

This guide covers suspending an account, checking which of your accounts are currently suspended, and lifting a suspension. Start by logging in to WHM with your reseller username.

Suspend an account

1. In the WHM sidebar, type "suspend" into the search box and open Suspend/Unsuspend an Account. It also sits under Account Functions.
2. Find the account in the list. The search field filters by domain or username, which helps if you manage a lot of accounts.
3. Select the account you want to suspend.
4. Enter a short reason. The reason is stored with the account and shown back to you later, so write something you will still understand in three months, for example "Invoice 1042 unpaid, 22 Oct".
5. Click Suspend.

Once the account is suspended, cPanel login is refused, the website stops serving normally (visitors get a suspended-account page), and incoming mail is no longer accepted. Disk usage does not change, because nothing has been removed. Depending on how the server is set up, you may also see an option to stop automated systems from unsuspending the account again; leave it alone unless you have a billing integration that would reverse your change.

Suspending is reversible. Terminating an account is not. Use suspend whenever there is any chance the customer will come back.

Check which accounts are suspended

Open List Accounts from the sidebar. Suspended accounts are flagged in the list, and you can search or sort to pick them out. Opening an account's entry shows the suspension reason you recorded.

This is worth checking before you reply to a customer who says their site is down. A suspension set weeks ago is easy to forget about, and it looks identical to an outage from the customer's side.

Unsuspend an account

1. Open Suspend/Unsuspend an Account again.
2. Select the account.
3. Click Unsuspend.

Service normally returns right away: the site loads, cPanel login works, and mail is accepted again. Mail that senders tried to deliver during the suspension was rejected at the time and will not arrive retroactively, so let the customer know to ask anyone important to resend.

If it didn't work

• The account is not in the list. As a reseller you only see the accounts you own. If it was created under a different reseller, or directly by the server owner, you cannot act on it from your WHM.
• There is no Suspend/Unsuspend option. Your reseller privileges may not include account suspension. Get in touch and we can confirm what your account is allowed to do.
• The site still loads after you suspend it. The domain's DNS may point somewhere other than our server, or a proxy or CDN in front of the site may still be serving a cached copy. Check the domain's A record first, then clear any cache sitting in front of it.

If you are stuck, or you are weighing up whether to suspend or terminate an account, contact us at /support and we will go through it with you.

Stuck partway through? Support is answered by the engineers who run the servers, around the clock.

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