Sadly, not all websites and social networks are created equal when it comes to breaking up. With some, it takes only a couple of clicks to say good-bye, and for a few sites, if you stop paying for service, the site cut ties fairly quickly. Others make you jump through more hoops than a tiger at the circus. Even after you follow all of the required steps, some of these sites never quite separate from you, but keep vestiges of your relationship around forever.

No matter what you call it—deleting, canceling, removing, whatever—when you want to be rid of an online account, you'll find most sites don't feel obliged to make it too easy for you. After all, you don't want to rush into a break up. But if you're ready, we've cut to the chase as much as possible to give you the links, tips, and, in the most extreme cases, the phone numbers you need to sever ties.

This list includes the big-name sites we think most people use. If you're looking for a site that's not on our list, check out AccountKiller.com.

Did we miss a service you want out of? Let us know. And if you've managed to quit a service not in this story, be kind and share your tips.

SOCIAL NETWORKS

Digg 
You can only get rid of a Digg account by contacting the company directly via its contact form. It won't delete your previously made comments and submissions however; they're part of the permanent Digg record.

 
You have a couple of ways to leave Facebook behind. First is simple "deactivation." Click Account in the upper right of the Facebook webpage and visit your . Click the "deactivate" link at the bottom. You have to provide a reason for deactivation, whether you'll be back or not, and decide if you want to opt out of getting emails from Facebook while deactivated. Here's the trick: Deactivation is not the same as deletion. Your account simply becomes invisible. Your friends on Facebook will all think you bailed. However, you have the option to reactivate it in the future, without losing any photos, notes, or pokes.

True deletion of a Facebook account means losing all of those—so be sure you have local copies of photos and notes before you take this step. You can't reactivate. To do this, go to the .

Friendster 
Yes, Friendster still exists, but it's transitioning from a social network to "social entertainment site," so most of your stored social-networking info should be dead by now anyway. If you still want to sever ties, (and assuming you can remember your log-in), click Settings and scroll down to find the Cancel Account link. On a new page, you'll find the Cancellation Form in the middle. You need to provide your email address, password, give a reason you're canceling, and check off the "Yes, I want to cancel my Friendster account" box. You can even list what new social network you've moved to, just to make Friendster feel bad. Refresh the window, and you should no longer be logged into Friendster.

 
To close an account at this business networking site, log in, click your name at the upper right to get the dropdown menu, and select Settings. Find the Accounts tab toward the bottom, then click "Close your account." Give a reason you're leaving, and then click Continue. That's all it takes. Unfortunately, if you somehow have multiple accounts, you can't merge them—you'll have to close the accounts you don't use. If you accidentally close an account you want, call customer service within 72 hours to get it reactivated.

Memory Lane (now incorporating Classmates.com)
Ostensibly Classmates.com changed its main name—even though you can access the old interface from a link—to better reflect its branching out to connect you with more than just old schoolmates. Or it's because Classmates.com had a questionable rep and is notoriously hard to break free of...we may never know. But here's the scoop on killing that account now:

Go to http://www.classmates.com/cmo/user/remove. Pick a removal reason from the list provided, and then click "Remove Registration." The company promise it will "permanently remove" your registration from Memory Lane.

However, that is for users with free accounts. If you've paid—base cost is $15 for three months—you've got an All-Access Pass account (formerly a Gold membership), and that makes it a little more complicated. You have to contact the Member Care Team and someone will get back to you in email. Once you do that, you still have to go into the settings above to remove your registration for good.

Can't get satisfaction online? Classmates.com/Memory Lane can be reached at . I tried it, hit "1" for member care, and got an operator after a couple minutes. She said she can cancel any account, but they have to talk to the person whose name is on the account.

MyLife.com (formerly Reunion.com) 
The steps are easy to get off this site, which can tend to barrage free members with claims that people are searching for you in attempts to make you pay and see who the searchers are. Here are the steps: Log in, click My Account on the top right, find the Delete Account link, and then you have a two choices—you can click a link to just opt out of MyLife.com emails, or click the "Yes, delete my account" button. The latter can't be undone; you'll lose all mailbox data, profile info, and photos.

 
To break it off with this social network, first visit your MySpace account, select the MyStuff menu at the top of the page, and select Account settings. About halfway down the page on the left, under Account, there's a "Cancel Account" link. Your next option is to click a button with the same text. You'll be asked why you're leaving, then you click "Cancel Account" (again). Next you get an email at the address associated with the account. Don't forget to click the confirmation link in the email, which will take you back to MySpace so you can verify the address and get one more chance to change your mind. If you're set on ending it, click "Cancel Account" for the fourth damn time.

Keep in mind, there is no reactivation. Go through with the cancellation and you can't bring back your account—though you can create a new account using the same email address you used before. That won't restore your previous information, however.

If you check after a few days and your MySpace page is still there, you can safely assume the deletion didn't go through. Then you'll need to email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and ask for assistance.

StumbleUpon 
It doesn't come much easier than this: Visit http://www.stumbleupon.com/delete_account.php, put in your account name and password, and click the Delete Account button to eradicate your presence on the site.

No surprise, if you kill an account with Twitter, all your tweets are lost. In addition, you can't create a new Twitter account with the old email address associated with that old account. You can get around this by changing the email address before you remove the old account.

Twitter wants people to know before deleting: You don't have to kill an account to change the username. Twitter is one of the few services where the username is as malleable as the password. If you simply want to limit access to your tweets, "protect" your profile, so that only followers you approve can see posts. To do so, go to your  and tick the checkbox next to Protect my Updates.

Deletion is so simple, here it is in less than 140 characters: Click Settings, select Delete My Account at the bottom, confirm, and you're done.

ONLINE RETAILERS

Closing your account at Amazon means you'll no longer have access to Wish Lists, Associate Accounts, or anything else normally attached to an account. Cancellation is not necessary if all you want to do is change your email or credit card on the account. You can do either of those under the Your Account link, which you'll find in the upper right-hand corner of any Amazon page.

To actually delete an account altogether, make sure you have no outstanding orders. Follow this link to the information on . Click the yellow Contact Us button in the text—not the one to the far right. They go to different forms. To do this, you'll have to sign in one last time. On the E-Mail tab, under "Issue," select Close My Account from the drop-down menu. Write a brief note to Amazon telling them why, and send it off.

Call ( for international customers) to follow up if the account still appears live after you close it. When I phoned, the operator said the note method is the best way to go.

Audible.com 
Amazon's arm for audiobooks has an Account Details link on every page. Click it, verify your password (if you linked the account to your Amazon account, use your Amazon password) and look for the Change My Membership link. Scroll down to the Cancel Membership link. This won't appear if you've already tried to cancel the account at some point.

Canceling means saying buh-bye to any accumulated credits on your account. However, you can still get access to your library of audiobooks, to re-download if needed, which is a nice touch.

If the cancellation doesn't work, Audible won't do anything if you try following up by email. You need to call them at or outside of the U.S. and Canada.

eBay 
Killing an eBay account means never going back—at least, not with the same email address or user ID. Cancellation is not immediate; you get 180 days to finalize any transactions. If you change your mind during that time, you can reactivate the account before eBay finalizes the shutdown. EBay holds on to records about you even after shuttering your account, a policy it says "is necessary to comply with laws, prevent fraud, collect any fees owed, resolve disputes, troubleshoot problems, assist with any investigations, enforce our eBay User Agreement, and take other actions as permitted by law."

You also have the option to only delete your seller account, but maintain the ability to make purchases on eBay. Simply remove all the payment info by clicking All Payment Methods on your Seller Account page and then clicking Remove. No more selling for you.

To close an eBay account altogether, visit the Close my eBay Account page. You'll have to sign in. eBay asks you to select why you want out from a list of categories (security concerns, billing issues, and the like) and then pick a more specific reason. After that, select "No, Please close my account," and hit Continue to keep going.

EBay has a few toll-free numbers you can call: , , and , from 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Pacific Time. Press 2 to get customer support. The recording will try to get you to use Live Customer support online.

If you sign on and go to My Account from the menu on the top of the page, you can manage email subscriptions to cut down on how much Groupon sends. That's pretty much all you can do online. Your main choice to quit Groupon all together is to directly email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or use the form at

Hulu 
Did you sign up for Hulu Plus, but you're disappointed by the selection of what's actually available to watch when away from the PC? Hulu may have anticipated your need to quit with a simple procedure to do so. Go to your Account page at Hulu.com, look for Billing Information, and just click "Cancel subscription." If you do this during a free trial, you're done. If you do it during a month of service, it will provide a refund and let you finish out watching shows for a month.

If you don't even want the free Hulu account, find the link on the Accounts page that says "Delete my free Hulu account." You'll have to confirm it, and then you're done. If you're logged in, you can click onhttp://www.hulu.com/users/delete and do that automatically. Just don't click and confirm it unless you mean it.

iTunes 
The iTunes Store operates through the iTunes software provided by Apple. If you don't have an iPod or iPhone or iPad and prefer to buy your music elsewhere, there's little reason to have an account with iTunes. Then again, it's not like the account costs anything if you're not making purchases. Either way, completely eradicating an iTunes account is near impossible, especially if you linked it with your overall Apple account. You can disable your iTunes, however. First, make sure that your credit card isn't associated with the account, so that future purchases are impossible. Open the iTunes application, go to the Store menu, select Sign In or View My Account (depending on whether you've used the account recently), sign in, click Edit Payment Information, and select "none" next to credit card. Other than that, your only option is to contactiTunes Support at directly and ask Apple to kill the account.

There's one good reason to keep an iTunes account active even long after you stop using it: DRM. The digital rights management tied to older music purchased through the iTunes Store corresponds to your iTunes account. Some music may not be playable on your iDevice if the account is dead. (This is not an issue if you have worked around the DRM; you can legally do that by burning music to a CD, then re-ripping the files back to your computer.)

Netflix 
If you want to cancel Netflix just because you're going on vacation and don't want to get new DVDs while you're away, try putting your account on hold instead. You get from 7 to 90 days to have it on hold. You will not be billed during that time, but you obviously don't get any new DVDs from your queue and can't stream video either.

When you want really want to cancel, Netflix does it in real time and warns, "Cancellation will be effective immediately." Once you do it, you can sign up for another account, but you won't be eligible for a free trial ever again. After cancellation, you have seven days to return any outstanding rented DVD discs. You'll get one email from them to confirm the cancellation, and that's it. No more DVDs and no more streaming movies.

How do you do it? Visit the Your Account page and click Cancel Membership. Check the box next to "I accept and understand the terms of cancellation and want to cancel my account." Click Continue. You're done.

 
EBay owns PayPal, so while the two are intertwined, they remain separate enough that you don't have to kill both. If you want to cancel your PayPal account, make sure to get all your funds out first by transferring them to a bank account.

To close the account, log in, click the Profile link and then click My Settings. At the top, it says "Account Type" to the left and on the right is a link reading "Close Account." You'll be asked to verify that you're the account owner by entering either your credit card number of bank account number.

If you want to call, first visit this Contact Us page while logged in. You'll get a six-digit PIN code that's good for 1 hour and will help them access your account info faster. Then dial , Monday through Friday from 4 a.m. to 10 p.m. Pacific Time, or weekends 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. Pacific Time.

ONLINE SERVICES

AIM/AOL 
Once upon a time it was next to impossible to cancel an AOL or AIM account without either 1) ceasing to use it so the company deleted it from inactivity or 2) violating terms of service so badly it kicked you off.

Now you can go to cancel.aol.com, sign in with your username or email, answer your account security question, and then click Cancel. Next you'll need to give a reason you're leaving, click the Cancel AOL button, and that's it.

If you're a paid user of an AOL account, you'll have to convert it to a free account first, plus you'll get to continue using it until the end of your billing cycle. And you get six months to restore the account before it's deleted for good. Go to your My Accounts page, click Service Options, and then go to Manage My Subscriptions. You click Cancel Billings at the bottom, give them a reason you'd do such a thing, and you're no longer paying. Now go back to Manage My Subscriptions, find the free account info, and click Cancel under that. Give another reason, click Cancel AOL, and you're done.

Apple's MobileMe 
What used to be Apple's Mac online services is now MobileMe. The suite of features—like mail, calendar, iDisk online storage, webpage hosting, and more—costs $99 per year (or $149 for a family). You can try it for 45 days, and if you cancel before that time, you get your money back. To cancel in general, log in atme.com, go to the menu in the upper right of the webpage, click Account, and find the Cancel Account button. Turn off MobileMe iDisk syncing before canceling to avoid losing any contacts on your local hard drive.

In case you need help, 800-APL-CARE is the basic Apple Care tech support line.

Most Google services are tied very closely to a single Google account—if you have one, and you kill it, you lose access to all those services. Some Google services can be turned off individually (see YouTube and Blogger below, for example).

To kill that main account, sign on via the Google home page and click your name at the top. From the drop down menu, select Account Settings. Click Edit (next to My Products).

You're now on the . From here you can remove your accounts for Gmail, Google Browser Sync (which is defunct now, but may still have stored your bookmarks and passwords), Google Health, Google Web History, Google Book Search, and Google Video.

Or, click the "Close account and delete all services and info associated with it" link at the bottom of the Delete a Product page. Guess what that does? You can review all the data associated with your Google account at your .

Google doesn't offer any kind of phone support, but you can call if you're really desperate.

Blogger 
This Google-owned blogging service has accounts that can't be closed. What Blogger does offer are steps to "create the same effect." First, delete all blogs associated with the account and remove any personal info from your user profile. Blogger even suggests you enter false information in the required fields to get around them. That's all you can do.

Note that if you change your email address on the account to a false one, even you will lose access to it. Do that only if you know there is a zero percent chance of coming back to the service.

 
YouTube is owned by Google, and your accounts with both may be linked. Unlink them if you want to cancel with YouTube, but not Google. Unlinking requires you to sign in to YouTube, click your user name to access the My Account menu, and then click Settings. Click Manage Account on the left, and pick "Change which Google Account is linked to this account." If you don't see that option, then your accounts probably aren't linked or you created your YouTube account from your Google account, so you can't unlink them. Canceling your Google account means all your YouTube videos are deleted.

Either way, you can always kill just a YouTube account/profile. On that same Account Settings page, click Close Account. Give them a reason why you're leaving, enter your password, and then click Close Account. Be sure to log out after that. The site may take some time to delete all the thumbnails of your videos.

Skype
It's not possible to completely get rid of a Skype account. Maybe that'll change if it comes under the Microsoft umbrella in the future. For now, all you can do is delete all your profile information so no one can find your account. That doesn't take you off of other people's Skype contact lists if you're already there, but they can't contact you if you don't sign in. Deleting profiles in the Windows version of Skype 5.0 is easy. Under the Skype menu, select Profile and then Edit Your Profile.

Meebo 
This great aggregator of instant messaging services isn't for everyone. If you tried it—meaning, you signed up for the full Meebo account—and didn't like it, there's a very easy way to get out of it athttp://www.meebo.com/support/deleteaccount/. You'll have to enter your Meebo ID and password and give a reason for closing it, but then you're done. Once the account is gone, you can't reactivate it with the same ID, and all of your old stored conversations are gone too.

Windows Live 
Your Windows Live ID is meant to be a single sign-in to everything Microsoft-esque, from the MSN portal to Hotmail to Windows Live Messenger to Zune Marketplace, even the Xbox Live service. Third parties like Expedia also use it. Killing your Windows Live ID could undo access to a lot of services and software—but that's your call.

On the top of most Windows Live pages, you'll see your name. Click it to get a dropdown menu, and then click Account. This page lets you edit your contact information, passwords and security questions, and more. At the bottom, under Additional Options, you'll see the link for Close Your Account. If all goes well, you'll enter your password and that's it.

It won't be that simple for most people, however. You can't cancel if 1) you have an active Windows Live Hotmail account, or 2) you have paid, premium services associated with your Live ID (for example, an Xbox Live Gold account). You need to close these services first. You also can't shut down a Live ID if it's "a secondary account to an MSN Premium account"—which you have if you're paying MSN for items like security software, file sharing, or even dial-up Internet access. Cancel premium services by visiting your while logged in to your Live ID.

Hotmail accounts can be deactivated via the Close your Account page. This eradicates all previous messages, but you'll have 270 days to reactivate it with mail intact. There's also a separate link for MSN/Messenger accounts at https://account.live.com/CloseAccount.aspx.

Got more serious problems? Call 800-MICROSOFT.

Wikipedia
If you ever contributed to Wikipedia in anyway, well, you're stuck with that account for life. The online über-encyclopedia doesn't want user names to go away when those names are likely attributed to the data on the site. You can change user names and delete some account info however, but it'll never go away completely.

 
Yahoo carefully ties all of its services to a single account. Canceling it ensures that you'll never again get access to Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Messenger, the My Yahoo home page, Yahoo Groups, or any other service where you use your Yahoo ID. Sometimes you can get around that by creating a new account to associate with a particular service, but if you want to get rid of them all, here's what you do.

First, cancel any premium services with the company, such as Web hosting or selling. You'll find that on the. After that, visit the . You'll get info that spells out how this affects access to Yahoo services and a notice that deactivation and deletion can take as long as 90 days, which Yahoo claims "is necessary to discourage users from engaging in fraudulent activity." By canceling, someone else can come in and sign up using your old ID, though they won't be able to access any of your old data, of course.

If you only want to get rid Yahoo's Flickr service for photo sharing, you can do that by visitinghttp://www.flickr.com/profile_delete.gne. It'll clear out your cache of pics instantly.

Yahoo! customer service can be reached at and is open Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time.

DATING SITES

eHarmony
If you paid recently for eHarmony and want a refund of some money, call them at , Monday to Friday, 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Pacific Time (or 8:00 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. on Saturdays). If you don't want or expect a refund, you can quit the service by accessing your membership page on the site and selecting My Settings and then Account Settings. Look for Subscription Status and click either "Cancel My Subscription" (so you don't pay anymore, but your matches stay accessible) or "Close Account."

Match.com 
If you're trying Match.com's free trial and don't want to continue, you can resign your subscription. Go to your Account Settings and select the Change/Cancel Membership page. If you're a paid member and don't want to renew, hit the same page. You can still sign in until the end of your subscription term, however. Once you've found a new love, just make sure to hide that profile. You can't really delete it forever. Match.com says it keeps your data in storage even if it's not accessible to others "for historical and legal purposes only."

Zoosk 
If you signed up for Zoosk but want out, go to your Zoosk Settings page and click on the "Cancel Subscription" link, but that won't totally deactivate the account yet. Sign in one last time, and then visit this link: http://www.zoosk.com/cancel.php?from=account-deactivate. If you use the Zoosk app on a social network like Facebook, removing it doesn't cancel your subscription or your account.