Domain Expiration Monitoring: How Not to Lose Your Domain

Short answer: a domain registration ends on a fixed date. If the renewal fails, your website and your email stop working within days, and a few weeks later the name can be registered by anyone. Auto-renew at your registrar is the first line of defence, but it fails quietly — an expired card, a reminder sent to a mailbox nobody reads. The second line is to watch the expiry date yourself, straight from the registry, and get warned 30, 14 and 7 days before it.

Facts verified on 14 October 2026 against ICANN's Expired Registration Recovery Policy and a contemporary report of the incident described below. Sources are listed at the end.

What happens when a domain expires

For generic domains such as .com, .net or .org, ICANN's Expired Registration Recovery Policy sets the minimum rules every registrar has to follow:

Country-code domains (.uk, .fr, .pl, .de, .cz and the rest) follow the rules of their own registry, which can be shorter, longer or simply different. If your main domain is a country code, check its registry's policy rather than assuming the table above.

What breaks when the domain goes dark

An expired domain is not a website problem. It is everything that uses the name:

• Website and API — the name no longer resolves, so nothing reaches your servers, including webhooks from payment providers.
• Email — incoming mail bounces, and so do password resets and the registrar's own warnings if they go to an address on the same domain.
• Integrations — forms, scripts and links embedded on other people's sites stop working.
• Certificates — renewals fail, because the certificate authority can no longer validate a domain that does not resolve.

It happens to well-run companies too. On 25 July 2017 marketo.com, the main domain of the marketing automation platform Marketo, stopped resolving and customers could not log in. The chief executive's explanation is worth quoting: the company renews “thousands of domain name properties” every year, “yet the auto renew process for registering our main domain, Marketo.com, failed.”

Why auto-renew is not enough

Auto-renew works until one of its assumptions stops being true. The usual ways it fails:

1. The payment fails. The card on the registrar account expired or was replaced, and the renewal charge is declined.
2. The reminders go nowhere. The contact address belongs to someone who left, a shared mailbox nobody reads, or an address on the very domain that is about to expire.
3. The account belongs to someone else. A former employee, a freelancer or a previous agency registered the domain in their own account.
4. Auto-renew is off for some names. Domains transferred in, bought in a promotion or registered "just in case" often have different settings from the main one.
5. Nobody knows the domain exists. Country versions, typo domains, old brand names that still redirect or still receive email — they expire just as surely as the main site.

Every one of these is invisible until the day the domain stops resolving. Your uptime monitor will tell you then, but by then customers already see an error.

Monitor the expiry date yourself

The fix is a check that does not depend on the registrar account, the card on file or anyone's inbox rules:

• read the expiry date from the registry, not from a note in a spreadsheet;
• warn well ahead — a month gives time to sort out payment or access problems, a week is the last comfortable moment;
• send the warnings to an address that does not depend on the domain being watched;
• cover every domain you own, including the ones without a website.

How AlertSleep watches your domains

Enter any domain in the free Domain Expiration Checker to see its expiry date and how many days are left. Leave your email next to the result and confirm it, and we will keep watching that domain for you:

• the expiry date is read from the registry's WHOIS, not from your registrar account;
• reminders go out 30, 14 and 7 days before expiry, in your language;
• once the registration is extended, the reminders start over for the new date;
• you can repeat it for every domain you own — defensive and country domains included.

If you already monitor the site with AlertSleep, you can watch its domain from the same place: open the monitor, expand Advanced Settings and turn on “Monitor domain expiry”. The registration is then looked up once a day, and warnings arrive by email and in the dashboard 30, 14, 7, 3 and 1 day before expiry. If the monitor watches a subdomain such as api.example.com, the registration checked is example.com.

It works for .com, .net, .org and most other generic domains, and for many country codes, including .uk, .fr, .pl and .cz. Some registries do not publish an expiry date over WHOIS at all — DENIC, for .de domains, is the best-known example. For those, keep auto-renew on and check the date in your registrar's panel.

Domain expiry is one of two dates that take a working site offline without any code changing. The other is the TLS certificate, whose maximum lifetime is shrinking from 200 days today to 47 days in 2029 — read SSL Certificate Validity 2026–2029 for what that changes.

A 15-minute domain checklist

1. List every domain you own — log in to every registrar account you know of and look at the DNS zones you manage. Include redirects, country versions and old brand names.
2. Check who owns each registrar account and make sure a current team member can log in.
3. Change the contact email to an address that is not on the domain itself and that more than one person reads.
4. Turn on auto-renew and check that the card on file is valid beyond the next renewal date.
5. Renew your most important domains for several years, so a single failed payment is not a crisis.
6. Turn on the registrar lock (transfer lock) to stop unauthorised transfers.
7. Add an independent reminder for every domain on the list.

FAQ

Can I get an expired domain back?

Usually, if you act quickly. For generic domains you can renew for at least 8 days after expiry, and after deletion there is a 30-day Redemption Grace Period in which the registration can be restored, often for an extra fee. After that the name is released and anyone can register it.

I have auto-renew turned on. Do I still need monitoring?

Auto-renew only works if the payment goes through and the account still belongs to you. Monitoring is the check that tells you when one of those assumptions has quietly stopped being true, while there is still time to fix it.

Do subdomains expire separately?

No. Only the registered domain expires. When example.com lapses, www.example.com, api.example.com and every other subdomain go with it.

How early should I be warned?

A month before expiry is enough to fix payment or account problems without stress, and a week before is the last comfortable moment. That is why the reminders go out at 30, 14 and 7 days.

Why can't some domains be checked?

Each registry decides what it publishes. Some, like DENIC for .de, do not include an expiry date in their public WHOIS answers, so there is no date to read. For those, keep auto-renew on and check the date in your registrar's panel.

Sources

• ICANN — Expired Registration Recovery Policy
• CMSWire — Marketo outage caused by failure to renew its domain