"Hosting stops" covers three different situations, and they're not equally bad.

Situation 1: a lapsed payment

The card expired, the invoice went to an old email, and after a few days of warnings the host suspends the account.

What a visitor sees: an error page, a "this account is suspended" notice, or sometimes an advertisement the host places on unpaid accounts.

What to do: pay it. Most hosts restore the site within minutes to a few hours of payment. Nothing is lost — suspension isn't deletion — and this is by far the most common case.

The recovery cost is a few days of visitors, not the site.

Situation 2: the host shuts down or you cancel

Small hosting companies get acquired, fold, or migrate customers to a new platform with an email you didn't read.

What a visitor sees: a dead site, and sometimes a domain that resolves to a "this site is no longer available" page the new owner put up.

What to do: if the account still exists, download everything — the files, and for WordPress the database export. Most hosts have a one-click backup or a file manager. Do it immediately, before the login stops working.

If the account is already gone, your only copy is a backup: one you made, or one the host made and you can still request. This is the situation where people lose websites.

Situation 3: you cancel the wrong thing

Someone switches to a builder, then cancels "the website" at the old host — which also had the email accounts. The site moves fine; every mailbox disappears, and nobody notices until a customer says their email bounced.

Check before cancelling anything: does this account hold email addresses? Does it hold the domain registration? Cancel the hosting and keep the domain — they're often separate items on the same bill.

What survives, and what doesn't

Thing	If hosting stops
Your domain	Survives, if it's registered separately and paid. It just points at nothing.
Your website files	Survive at the host for a while; deleted eventually.
Your email	Stops immediately. Messages sent during the gap are lost, not queued.
Search ranking	Decays. A few days is fine; a few months is a rebuild.
Printed cards	Unaffected — the address still resolves to the domain.

The recovery, step by step

1. Confirm it's hosting, not the domain. A WHOIS lookup shows whether the domain is still registered and paid. If it's the domain, that's a different and more urgent problem — see what happens when a domain expires.
2. Get the files. Log into the old host and download the site folder and any database export. Ask support if you can't find it.
3. Pick a new host or builder and upload or rebuild. For a one-page site, rebuilding from a copy of the text is often faster than migrating.
4. Point the domain at the new host — nameservers or a DNS record, as the new host instructs.
5. Watch for 48 hours. DNS takes time. The site may appear and disappear for a few hours while it propagates.

How to not be in this position

• Keep a copy. Once a year, download your site or export it. Put it in a folder you back up. A website you can't restore is a website you don't own.
• Keep the domain and hosting on separate accounts where possible, so one lapsed card doesn't take both.
• Use an email address you'll keep for all these accounts — not one at the domain itself.
• Write down what you're paying for. A note listing domain registrar, host, email provider and renewal dates takes ten minutes and saves a very bad week.

For a free one-page service there's nothing to lose in this way — no bill, no account. The trade-off is that you don't control the hosting, so keep a copy of your own text somewhere. What hosting is explains the rest.