Domains expire. It’s a thing that happens, and when it does, it’s a bad day.
I had a domain renewal notice land in my inbox this week, 60 days out, which is plenty of warning. But I’ve seen situations where a client’s domain lapsed because the renewal notice went to an old email address, or to a developer who’d moved on, or just got lost in a busy inbox. When a domain expires, your website goes down, your emails stop working, and if you don’t act fast, someone else can register it.
Recovering a lapsed domain can cost anywhere from nothing to several hundred dollars, depending on how far into the expiry grace period you are. And if someone else snaps it up (a squatter, a competitor) you may not get it back at all.
What actually helps
- Register your domain in your own name, with auto-renew turned on and a credit card attached
- Make sure renewal notices go to an email you actually check: not an old address, not a developer’s inbox
- Know who your registrar is (the company you pay for the domain) and be able to log in
- Keep DNS managed somewhere reliable: Cloudflare gives you a free layer between your registrar and your servers, and their dashboard makes it easy to see exactly what’s pointing where
None of this is hard to set up once. The problem is most people don’t set it up until something breaks. I’d rather spend 20 minutes getting this right for a client than spend two hours on a Saturday trying to recover a domain that’s gone dark. For businesses that would rather not track any of it themselves, our Domain & DNS management service handles expiry monitoring and renewals for you.
If you’re not sure who owns your domain or where your DNS records live, that’s worth finding out today, not when something stops working.
We can check your domain registration and DNS setup and make sure everything is in order.