The domain and the hosting are separate services, so you can drop one and keep the other. Cancel hosting and the domain stays registered and renews on its own schedule. Move hosting elsewhere and the domain doesn't have to move with it. The part people trip on is the free domain for life perk: it's free only while you keep hosting active with us. Drop the hosting and the domain keeps working, but it renews at standard price going forward.
Keeping the domain, dropping the hosting
If you cancel your hosting plan, nothing happens to the domain automatically. It stays registered under your account through its current expiry date, and you can renew it, transfer it, or point it anywhere you like.
The one thing that changes is price. A domain that came free with hosting was free because the hosting stayed active. Once hosting is cancelled, the next renewal bills at the domain's normal rate. You'll see this on the domain's card in Domains, where Renew now shows the current renewal price and the Auto-renew toggle controls whether that charge happens automatically.
Your site itself won't keep working without hosting, but the domain's DNS is a separate thing from the hosting account. If you want the domain to point somewhere else, either park it, or set up new hosting and repoint nameservers as described in changing nameservers at GoDaddy, Namecheap, and Cloudflare. If you leave a cancelled domain with no destination, it'll usually just resolve to nothing or show a browser error, which is fine if you're not using it yet.
Keeping the domain where it is, moving the hosting
The reverse works too: you can host with us and keep the domain registered at GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, or wherever it already lives. Nothing about the registration has to change. All you do is point that domain's nameservers at ours. The exact steps for the common registrars are in changing nameservers at GoDaddy, Namecheap, and Cloudflare.
This is also the setup if you later decide to move hosting away from us but keep your domain registered here. The domain keeps renewing under your account, you just change where it points.
What "free for life" actually depends on
The free-domain perk is tied to the hosting service, not to the domain record itself.
- Hosting stays active with us, domain registered with us: the domain renews at no charge for as long as the hosting stays active.
- Domain transferred out to another registrar: it's no longer part of a Flashcloud hosting bundle, so it renews at whatever that registrar charges.
- Domain registered elsewhere, hosting bought here: the free-domain perk never applied in the first place, since it only kicks in on domains registered through us at signup.
See what happens if I forget to renew my domain for what happens if a renewal is missed.
Checking where things stand
Go to Domains and open the domain in question. The card shows the current status, the next renewal date and price, and the auto-renew toggle. Renew now reflects whatever the actual price will be at that point, so if a free domain has lost its hosting bundle, you'll see the real renewal price there before you're charged anything. If the price looks wrong, or you're not sure whether a specific domain is still tied to an active hosting service, open a ticket from Support and we'll check the account directly.