A domain is your company’s address on the internet. Your website and email run on it, and most of the time you do not think about it. Until the day it expires. Then overnight the website and mail stop working. Let us explain why domain expiry is such a silent and dangerous problem and how to defend against it.

What happens when a domain expires

A domain is not paid for forever, it is rented for a period (usually for years) and needs renewing. When that is missed, a chain of problems follows:

  • The website stops working. The page stops loading and customers cannot find you.
  • Email stops coming. If you have email with your own domain, mail stops working, which is often even worse than a website outage.
  • The risk of losing the domain. After a grace period, someone else can register the domain. You then get it back with difficulty and at high cost, sometimes not at all.
  • Loss of SEO and trust. An outage and possible loss of the domain destroy a search position built over years.

The worst part is that it happens silently. A domain does not start flashing red, it simply stops working one day.

Why it happens

  • A missed reminder email about renewal (ends up in spam or at an old address).
  • Outdated contact or payment details at the registrar, so the renewal does not go through.
  • An expired payment card the domain was supposed to be renewed from.
  • A change of the responsible person in the company, with no one to watch the domain.

How to defend against it

1. Turn on auto-renew

The simplest step. At most registrars you can turn on automatic renewal, so the domain extends itself. Note, it only works if you have a valid payment card.

2. Keep your details up to date

Check that you have the correct contact email and valid payment details at the registrar. This is the most common cause of a failed renewal.

3. Register for several years

A domain can usually be registered several years in advance. Fewer renewals means fewer opportunities to miss something.

4. Know who manages the domain

In a company it should be clear who is responsible for the domain and where the access is. When an employee leaves, the domain is easily forgotten.

5. Watch the expiry date

And this is the most important. Do not rely only on a single email from the registrar, which is easily lost. Keep the expiry under independent watch that alerts you in advance.

How ePulz.io watches the expiry for you

This is exactly what the monitoring platform ePulz.io is for. Besides website availability and SSL certificates, it also watches your domain’s expiry date and alerts you well in advance, before it expires. This way you learn about the approaching expiry in time and manage to renew the domain, without a website and email outage. You can try it for free during a 7-day trial.

It is an independent extra insurance: even if you miss the registrar’s email, ePulz.io reminds you that action is needed. It similarly watches the SSL certificate expiry and overall website availability.

Conclusion

Domain expiry is a silent problem with loud consequences: it takes down the website and email, and in the worse case you lose the domain entirely. The defense is fortunately simple: turn on auto-renew, keep details up to date, register for several years and above all keep the expiry under independent watch that alerts you in time.

Want certainty that your domain will not expire and take down your website and email? Get in touch, we will set up renewal and oversight of the expiry.

This article is part of our Business and IT overview.