Domain expiring soon

The website, immediately, for everyone — not a degraded experience but a name that does not resolve.

Email, in both directions. Incoming mail bounces at other people's servers, and outgoing mail fails authentication because the SPF, DKIM and DMARC records are gone with the zone.

Every integration addressed by hostname: payment webhooks, single sign-on, API clients, monitoring, backups shipping to a named endpoint.

Certificate renewal, since automated issuance validates control of a domain that no longer resolves. So even after the domain is restored, the certificate may have lapsed in the meantime.

And search visibility, which recovers considerably more slowly than the domain does.

An expired payment card on the registrar account. The most common cause by a wide margin, and the most preventable.

Renewal notices going to an address nobody reads — a former employee, a role address that was deprecated, a spam folder.

Auto-renewal that was never enabled, or that was disabled during a registrar migration and not restored.

A domain registered by an agency or a contractor on their own account, where the relationship ended and the renewal did not transfer.

A registrar-lock or verification requirement blocking the renewal — an unverified registrant contact under ICANN rules can suspend a domain regardless of payment.

And a transfer in progress across the expiry date, which is the worst timing available and produces the most confused recovery.

For most generic top-level domains there is a grace period after expiry during which the registrant can renew at the normal price, typically around thirty days, though the domain may stop resolving immediately.

Then a redemption period of roughly thirty days, during which recovery is possible and carries a substantial restoration fee.

Then a pending-delete period of about five days, after which the name is released and anyone may register it.

Country-code domains follow their own registry's rules, which differ in both duration and cost, and some are considerably less forgiving.

An expired domain that has been registered by someone else is, in practice, gone — and it can then be used to receive mail addressed to your former staff.

Registrar lock, which prevents an unauthorised transfer. It should be on for any domain that matters.

The registrant contact address, which must be one that is monitored and is not on the domain itself — an expiry notice sent to an address at the expiring domain is unreachable exactly when it is needed.

Who owns the registrar account. A domain held on a contractor's personal account is a business continuity risk regardless of the expiry date.

Auto-renewal state and the payment method's own expiry date, which is the failure that hides behind an enabled setting.

Whether the registrant contact has been verified, since an unverified contact can suspend a domain independently of renewal.

A WHOIS or RDAP query returns the expiry date, the registrar and the lock status. RDAP is the structured successor and is what most registries now serve.

Check every domain you hold, including the ones redirecting to the main site, the ones bought defensively, and the regional variants. Those are the ones nobody watches.

Confirm the renewal notice address is monitored by sending a test message to it.

Monitor the date externally and alert well ahead — sixty days is reasonable, because a payment or verification problem can take weeks to resolve.

`domain.expiry` reads the registration record and reports the expiry date and the time remaining.

`domain.registrar` reports which registrar holds the domain, which is where the renewal and the lock live.

`dns.resolution` and `dns.nameservers` report whether the domain currently resolves and which nameservers answer, which is what fails first when a registration lapses.

`domain.subdomains` and `domain.tld` cover the adjacent question of which related names exist, since the forgotten ones are the ones that expire.