Domain Registration Expiring

Renew the domain first, and work out how this happened afterwards. An expiry date is a wall, not a gradient: when the domain lapses, the website, the email, and everything else using the name stop at the same moment, and getting it back costs progressively more the longer you wait.

Symptom

DownBad reports that your domain registration expires in N days, or that it has already expired. WHOIS monitors carry a warning threshold (30 days by default) and a critical threshold (7 days by default); the check fails inside the critical window so the alert arrives while renewal is still routine.

Some ccTLD registries do not publish an expiry date at all. If yours does not, the monitor cannot warn you about expiry — set a calendar reminder instead, and keep the monitor for the registrar and nameserver checks it can still do.

Likely causes

• Auto-renew is off, or on with a card that expired. This is the most common cause by a wide margin, and the second half of it is the one that catches careful people.
• Renewal notices went somewhere nobody reads. A departed employee’s inbox, an unmonitored role account, or a WHOIS-privacy forwarding address that silently bounces.
• The domain is on a personal account. Bought years ago by one person, and the notices go to them rather than to the company.
• A registrar transfer left renewal in limbo. Transfers within 60 days of expiry are frequently refused, and the domain sits between two registrars with neither renewing it.
• The registrant contact was never verified. ICANN requires a verifiable registrant email on gTLDs, and an unverified address gets the domain suspended. From the outside that looks exactly like an expiry.

Fix steps

1. Renew it now. Everything else on this page can wait until it is renewed.

2. Log in to the registrar named on the incident. The check records the registrar from the WHOIS response. If you do not know which one it is:

   whois example.com | grep -i "registrar\|expiry\|expiration"

3. Renew for multiple years, not one. Domains are cheap and this failure mode is expensive. Five years on anything load-bearing removes the whole class of problem.

4. Turn auto-renew on, and check the card on file has not expired. Auto-renew with a dead card is the failure this page exists for.

5. Verify the registrant email is one a human reads today, and complete any pending ICANN verification. An unverified contact suspends the domain regardless of how long you paid for.

6. If it has already expired, act on the clock. Most gTLDs give roughly 30 days of grace at the normal renewal price, then roughly 30 days of redemption at a punitive fee — often over $100 — and then the domain drops and anyone can register it. Renewing during grace costs nothing extra. Waiting hurts, and waiting for it to drop so you can re-register it cheaply is how people lose domains permanently.

7. Re-run the check after renewing. Registry WHOIS can lag by an hour or two, so the incident may stay open briefly after the payment goes through.

Danger

If the domain expired rather than merely approaching expiry, check your mail too. A lapsed domain stops delivering mail, and messages sent to you during the outage are gone — they are not queued anywhere for you to collect afterwards.

Prevention

• Auto-renew on, with a payment method that outlives the registration. Put a calendar reminder on the card’s expiry, not just the domain’s.
• Register for five or more years on anything your business depends on.
• Use a role address with two people on it — domains@yourcompany — as the registrant contact, never an individual’s inbox.
• Keep domains in a company account at a registrar you would recommend, not in a personal account at whichever one was cheapest in 2019.
• Turn on registrar transfer lock. It costs nothing and blocks the fastest route to losing the name.
• Set the WHOIS monitor’s warning threshold to 45 days or more, so a suspended card has time to be noticed and replaced.

WHOIS monitors also watch the registrar, the technical contact email, and the nameservers for changes. If one of those changed and you did not change it, treat it as a possible takeover and go to DNS Records Changed Unexpectedly.