Cancel Google Workspace User

Hello, I see you were able to reach our phone support team. Were they able to help you out with the Google Workspace cancellation?

Yes.  However, I would like to post about how to transition your Google Workspace subscription from Homestead (Endurance) to Google in order to help any other users that find themselves in this same situation.

I have been a Homestead customer for 20+ years so I was happy to sign up for Google Workspace through Homestead.  However, due to the large volume of emails and attachments we receive at work, I soon learned that I needed to upgrade our Google Workspace plan from the Business Starter package to the Business Standard package in order to gain more user storage as well as additional email user accounts for our employees.

Upon contacting Homestead, I was informed that Homestead's reseller Endurance does not offer any other Google Workspace subscription packages or upgrades other than the Business Starter.  With this information, I spoke with both Homestead and Google on numerous occasions in order to figure out the best way to end my Homestead subscription and then purchase a subscription through Google so I could upgrade our Google Workspace subscription to better fit our needs.

Here's what is important to note:  What I was told and what really happened are two different things - in a good way.  Let me explain:

Google said I could request for Homestead to transfer my subscription to the them without interrupting our data, email, etc.  It turns out that Homestead does not have the ability to transfer a subscription, they can only cancel it and after 24 hours I was told that I then would have the ability to set up a new Google Workspace account through Google with our website domain.  Homestead and Google both said that once I cancelled our subscription, we would lose all of our data associated with our domain email accounts.  This meant our email account, anything in our Google drive, our Google Sheets, Forms, Docs, etc. would be gone.  Therefore, I spent an entire week preparing for this transition by saving, forwarding, and backing up all of the data associated with our domain email accounts.  I finally was ready to cancel our Google Workspace subscription.  My original plan was to do the transition over the weekend, but you have to actually speak to a Homestead IT person to cancel it so it has to be during business hours.

So this morning I called Homestead to cancel our Google Workspace subscription with the intention we would not have email or any of our Google data for 24 hours. Then after 24 hours we could create a new Google Workspace account and try to re-create our account data to the best of our ability. This is what I was repeatedly told by both Homestead and Google and I can tell you that it is simply is not true.  This is what really took place.

When you cancel your Google Workspace subscription through Homestead, you actually have 20 days to restore it.  The cancellation process took about 5 mins on the phone with Homestead IT.  Immediately after the cancellation was complete, as the admin for our Google Workspace account, I received an email to re-subscribe to Google Workspace through Google.  I realized that my email and Google data were never disrupted or disappeared.  This was a very pleasant surprise.  The repeated warnings from Homestead and Google that we would not have access to our email accounts associated with our website domain for at least 24 hours was simply not true.  

In order for the cancellation to work, I did have to delete all of our users (non-admin accounts) while I was on the phone with Homestead IT so they could properly cancel the account.  {They do NOT cancel the admin account - my account}.  However, I was able to restore them instantly, within minutes!  Here's the trick to this.  After you subscribe to the new subscription through Google from the email they send you, instead of re-creating your other user accounts by "adding new user" you instead "restore deleted users".  For example, we have an email address that starts with info@ourcompany.com. At first I made the mistake and created a new user with the info@ourcompany.com address and the account was literally empty and starting from scratch.  I spoke with Google IT and they explained how I could actually restore that account.  So I removed that "new" user and then "restored deleted user" with the email address of info@ourcompany.com and VOILA! everything from that original account reappeared!  ALL of the account's data, emails, drive documents, etc. were completely restored!  It was a wonderful surprise!  In the end, our employees probably didn't have email or access to their account data for about 5 mins - the time it took me to re-activate and restore their accounts.

In conclusion, I spent a whole week preparing for something that I was told would happen that simply did not.  It's not as stressful as both Homestead and Google make it sound.  It literally only took 5 minutes to do the transition and restore all of our users email and drive accounts.  The term "cancel" should really be replaced with "suspended".  Your account is not irreversibly deleted.  Instead it's just momentarily paused for the amount of time it takes you to restore it.  You won't lose all of your data and it can be instantly restored - thank goodness!

If you have any questions, please reply to this comment.  I'm happy to help!

Hello, 

Please call 1-800-710-1998 and an agent will be able to assist you.