Domain registration expiry

The expiry date comes from the registry's RDAP record, with a WHOIS fallback where RDAP is unavailable. It is graded on proximity: expired or within a fortnight is a failure, within about six weeks is a warning, beyond that is a pass.

It is the one thing in this report that a perfect DNS configuration cannot protect you from, and it is graded harshly for that reason. Every other finding here degrades something. This one removes the domain from the internet completely — website, mail, APIs, single sign-on, anything that resolves a name beneath it — at a moment chosen by a billing system.

The reason it catches people who are paying attention is the grace period. Many registrars keep an expired domain resolving for weeks past the date, so nothing appears to break, and then it stops without further warning. For gTLDs the shape is roughly: an auto-renew grace period of up to 45 days, a 30-day redemption period during which recovery costs a restore fee rather than a renewal, five days pending delete, then release.

Some registries do not publish an expiry date at all — .uk and .de among them — and some rate-limit hard enough that nothing comes back. Both are reported as unknown and excluded from the score, because a gap in our data is not a finding about your domain.

Renew it, then check that auto-renew is actually on and that the card on file has not expired. A failed auto-renew is the usual cause, and the notice goes to whatever address is on the registrar account.

Make that address a role address that outlives an individual. The most common story behind a lapsed domain is that the person who registered it left, and the renewal notices have been going to a bouncing mailbox ever since.

Monitor the expiry date somewhere other than the registrar. The registrar's own emails are the channel that fails in exactly the scenario you are monitoring for, and they are also the ones most likely to be filtered as marketing.

For names you intend to keep indefinitely, register for several years and consider a registry lock. Both reduce the number of occasions on which a routine billing failure can take the business offline.