Domain expired

Your domain registration has lapsed, so your site is currently unreachable. You can usually recover the domain if you act within the grace period. Start by renewing it at your registrar.

Symptom

• The Domain registration card shows Expired. The domain stops resolving, so the uptime check marks the site Down separately. If the site still responds, the site page header shows Domain expired
• Your site is unreachable. Visitors see "This site can't be reached" or a registrar parking page
• Running whois example.com shows an expiry date in the past
• DNS lookups return NXDOMAIN because the domain has been removed from the registry zone

What it means

When a domain registration expires, the registrar stops paying the TLD registry to keep your domain in the zone. The registry removes the domain's records, and within a short propagation window, DNS lookups start returning NXDOMAIN, as though the domain had never existed. Visitors can't reach your site, email to your domain stops arriving, and any services that rely on your domain (SSO, API callbacks, subdomains) go silent too.

You can usually still recover the domain if you renew today. Most registrars hold expired domains through a grace period where you can renew at normal cost, followed by a redemption period where recovery is possible but expensive. After both windows close, the registry deletes the domain and releases it back to the public pool, where anyone can register it, including buyers who watch for newly freed domains.

Common causes

• Credit card on file with the registrar expired or was cancelled
• Auto-renew was disabled, often accidentally during a payment method update
• Renewal notification emails went to spam or to a former team member's inbox
• Domain ownership was transferred to a new registrar without updating billing or notification details
• An organisational change (someone leaving who held the registration in their personal account) meant renewal reminders reached nobody
• Multi-year registration ran out and wasn't set to renew

How to fix

1. Verify the expiry date via WHOIS. Run whois example.com and look for the expiry date. Confirm the domain has expired and not been suspended for another reason.

2. Log in to your registrar immediately. Find the domain in your account. If you're unsure which registrar holds it, the WHOIS output includes a "Registrar" field.

3. Renew before the redemption grace period. The auto-renew grace period (up to 45 days, varies by TLD) lets you renew at the standard rate. Once it ends, you enter the redemption period (typically 30 days), where recovery typically costs £60 to £160 on top of the renewal price, depending on the registrar.

4. Update your payment method and enable auto-renew. Fix the root cause: update the card on file, enable auto-renew, and confirm the registrar's billing emails go somewhere your team actively reads.

5. Check DomainDash expiry warnings reach your team. DomainDash shows Expiring from 30 days before expiry. At 7 days it shows Expiring soon and opens an incident at Worth knowing, raised to Needs a look at 1 day. When the date passes, a separate expired incident opens at Needs fixing. These incidents don't send an immediate alert. They appear in the app and in the daily digest, by email and, on Starter and above, Slack. Go to Settings → Notifications and confirm that incident emails reach someone on your team who will act on them.

6. Consider switching registrars if notifications failed. If your registrar sent no warnings before the lapse, moving to one with better reliability (Cloudflare Registrar and Namecheap are common choices) reduces the risk next time.

How to verify

After renewing the domain:

1. Run whois example.com and confirm the expiry date is now in the future.

2. Give DNS up to an hour to come back, then run:

   dig example.com A +short @8.8.8.8

   You should see the domain resolving to an IP address again.

3. Open the site in a browser and confirm it loads.

4. Open the site in DomainDash. Once WHOIS reports a future expiry date, the Domain registration card returns to Active at the next domain registration check, and the site page header reads Healthy once uptime checks confirm the recovery. If uptime for the selected timeframe (24 hours by default) is under 97%, it reads Unstable until the figure recovers. Roughly 45 minutes of downtime in a day is enough for that.

Most visitors can reach the site again within an hour of the renewal. A few may wait up to 48 hours, because resolvers can remember which nameservers a domain uses for two days.

If the domain was in the redemption period, your registrar has to restore it with the registry before any of this starts. That usually takes 24 to 72 hours after you pay, so check again once the registrar confirms the restore.

Related

• Domain expiring soon — the earlier warning state, when the domain is still active but approaching expiry
• Domain suspended or on hold — a different Down state caused by registrar action, not expiry
• Domain registration — how DomainDash tracks expiry dates and sends warnings
• How incidents work — how DomainDash opens and escalates a domain expiry incident