Domain expiry monitoring reads your domain's registration expiry date from public registration data (RDAP, the successor to WHOIS) and warns you before it lapses. Auto-renew alone is not enough: renewals fail on expired cards, unread account emails and transfers. Alert about 30 days out, again at 15 and 7 days, and treat the final days as an incident.
What happens when a domain expires?
A domain is not bought; it is registered for a fixed term, usually one year at a time, and has to be renewed before its expiry date. When the date passes without a renewal, the registrar typically stops the domain resolving to your servers and points it at a parking or renewal notice page instead.
Everything that uses the domain breaks at once: the website, every subdomain, your API, and email, because the MX records go with it. Certificate renewals that validate through DNS or HTTP start failing. Password reset emails to addresses on the domain stop arriving, which can include the address you would use to recover the registrar account itself.
The expiry lifecycle for generic TLDs
For generic top-level domains such as .com, .net and .org, an unrenewed domain moves through stages set by ICANN policy and registry rules. Registrars layer their own policies on top, so check yours.
- Expiry dateRenew before this and nothing happens to the domain.
- Auto-renew grace periodFor up to 45 days after expiry, the registry gives the registrar time to renew or delete the domain. Many registrars let you renew at the normal price during part of this window, but how long varies. ICANN's Expired Registration Recovery Policy requires registrars to interrupt the domain's normal resolution for at least eight consecutive days within the 30 days after expiry, while it can still be renewed, so your site is often already down.
- Redemption grace periodOnce the registrar deletes the domain, you usually have 30 days to restore it, normally with a restore fee on top of the renewal.
- Pending deleteFive days during which the domain cannot be recovered. After that it is released, and anyone can register it, including services that catch dropping domains automatically.
Country-code domains such as .in, .uk or .de follow their own registry rules, and some are stricter than the generic TLDs. Check the policy for every TLD you depend on.
Grace periods exist so you can recover a domain, not so you can keep using it. Your site and email can be down for most of that time, and after the redemption period, the domain can be gone for good.
Why does auto-renew fail?
Auto-renew works most of the time, which is exactly why its failures catch teams off guard. Common causes:
- The card on file expired or was replacedBanks reissue cards after fraud alerts and expiry dates come round. The renewal charge fails and the warning goes to the account email.
- Nobody reads the account emailThe registrar account belongs to a former employee, a founder's personal address, or an agency or contractor who built the original site. Every renewal reminder arrives somewhere nobody looks.
- Auto-renew was turned offTransfers between registrars, account migrations and registrar acquisitions can reset auto-renew settings without anyone noticing.
- The domain is not where you thinkMarketing bought a campaign domain on another registrar, an old brand domain still sends email, or a domain sits in a personal account. If it is not in your inventory, nobody renews it on purpose.
- The account needs attentionA payment declined by a bank's fraud rules for an international charge, an account that needs re-verification, or registrant contact details that were never confirmed can each block a renewal or suspend a domain.
How do you check a domain's expiry date?
Registration data, including the expiry date and registrar, is published by registries and registrars. There are two protocols for reading it.
- RDAPThe Registration Data Access Protocol returns structured JSON over HTTPS, and ICANN has made it the replacement for WHOIS for generic TLDs. The expiry date is the event with eventAction "expiration". The rdap.org redirect service sends a query to the right server: curl -sL https://rdap.org/domain/example.com.
- WHOISThe older text protocol, still used by many country-code registries. Run whois example.com and look for a line such as "Registry Expiry Date". The format differs from one registry to the next, which makes it awkward to automate.
Three details trip people up. First, a subdomain such as app.example.com has no expiry of its own; it lives and dies with example.com. Second, the registered domain is the part directly under the public suffix, so for shop.example.co.uk it is example.co.uk. Third, some registries renew a domain automatically at expiry and show the new date during the grace period, even though your registrar may still delete it if you do not pay. Treat any renewal email or payment failure from your registrar as seriously as an alert.
When should domain expiry alerts go out?
Like certificates, domains need warnings that escalate as the date approaches. Fixing a renewal problem can take days: recovering access to an old account, updating a payment method, or getting a contractor to hand a domain over.
- 60 to 90 days: a planning reminder. Confirm who owns the registrar account, that the payment method is valid and that auto-renew is on. A good moment to renew for several years.
- 30 days: the first real alert, to a shared team channel. Renewal should already be done or scheduled.
- 15 and 7 days: automation has failed. Escalate to whoever controls the registrar account and renew by hand.
- The last two days, and any day after expiry: an incident. Treat it like an outage, because it is about to become one.
Send expiry alerts to a shared channel or a team address, never to one person's inbox. The person who registered the domain is the one most likely to have left.
What to do if your domain has already expired
Act on the same day. Every day you wait moves the domain closer to a stage where recovery costs more, or is no longer possible.
- Find out which registrar holds the domain: an RDAP or WHOIS lookup shows it even when you have lost track of the account.
- Log in and renew. If the account belonged to someone who has left, contact the registrar's support with proof that the organisation is the registrant; they have a process for this, but it takes time.
- If the domain is in the redemption period, ask for a restore. Expect a restore fee on top of the renewal price.
- Once renewed, check the name servers and DNS records were not changed to a parking page, and put them back if they were. Resolvers may keep serving the parking answer until its TTL expires.
- Post a status page update if customers are affected, and tell anyone whose email to you may have bounced.
- Write a short postmortem: who owned the renewal, why the warnings were missed, and which of the steps below would have caught it.
Reduce the risk beyond monitoring
- Keep an inventory of every domain you own, including redirect, campaign and old brand domains that still send or receive email.
- Hold domains in a company-owned registrar account with shared access and two-factor authentication, not in personal accounts.
- Renew critical domains for several years at a time.
- Turn on registrar transfer lock, and consider a registry lock for the domains your business cannot run without.
- Keep a payment method on the registrar account that someone is responsible for updating.
- Do not let old domains lapse just because the website moved. A re-registered domain can receive email sent to your old addresses, including password reset links for accounts still tied to them.
How domain expiry monitoring works in SutramX
SutramX has no separate domain monitor type. Domain and certificate expiry tracking comes with every HTTP and API monitor, on its Domain & SSL card.
- Where the date comes fromDomain expiry and registrar come from RDAP. SutramX tries the full host name, then its parent domains (app.shop.example.com, shop.example.com, then example.com). If the registry does not publish an expiry date, which is common for country-code domains, the card shows Unavailable; SutramX never guesses a date.
- RemindersOff by default and set per monitor: tick Email me before the certificate or domain expires and choose Days ahead, from 1 to 90 (default 30). The domain and certificate get separate reminders.
- ScheduleReminders arrive at your Days ahead value (when it is more than 15), then at 15 days, 7 days, 2 days and 24 hours before expiry, and 1, 2 and 3 days after it if the domain is still not renewed. Each milestone is sent once per expiry date, and the schedule starts again after you renew.
- Where they goEmail goes to the monitor's alert recipients when the SSL Certificate Expiry preference is on under Alerting & On-call. Connected chat apps such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord and Telegram, and webhooks, receive reminders whenever they are on; webhooks get a domain.expiring event with the days remaining.
- FreshnessWhile reminders are on, the details refresh automatically every 6 hours, and Refresh runs a live lookup. Reminders never change the monitor's up or down status, and pausing a monitor pauses its reminders.
SSL certificate and domain expiry reminders are included with HTTP and API monitors on every SutramX plan, Free included. Setup details are in the SSL and domain expiry documentation.