Something super weird just happened to me and I want to make others aware that this can happen and to be vigilant about changing nameservers!
I went to add one of my old domains back to my shared hosting account account after removing it a few months back and kept being told that it was already being used on another account.
I only have one account with my hosting company, so I sent them a message asking why I was getting that message.
It turns out that, because I hadn’t changed/removed the nameservers on the domain after deleting the website, someone who also has a shared hosting account with my hosting company went and added a website with MY domain to their account.
This effectively meant that they’d stolen my domain and could have hosted anything they wanted on it until I changed the nameservers and contacted support.
I had to add a TXT record to prove ownership of the domain name to be able to add it back to my hosting account, which is fine, but changing the nameservers to make sure it couldn’t be added to someone else’s account would have been the best course of action.
So yeah, CHANGE YOUR NAMESERVERS when you remove a domain from your hosting account, friends!
It sucks that this happened to you! Recently I went from having two different accounts for my partner and I on the same hosting company to one shared account, and as I was consolidating everything I noticed how this was possible.
All I had to do was remove the domain from one account and add it to another, and it was immediately switched over because the nameserver was the same for both accounts. Convenient for me, annoying for you.