Domain expiring soon

Your domain's registration is approaching its end date, and DomainDash shows it as Expiring or Expiring soon. Renew now. It takes five minutes and costs standard renewal rates.

Symptom

• The Domain registration card shows Expiring (30 days or less) or Expiring soon (7 days or less)
• On the dashboard, the site card shows Renews · N days, and the site counts under Needs attention. Once the 7-day incident opens, the site card shows Alert and, while uptime is healthy, the site page header shows Domain expiring. At 1 day or less the header shows it unless the site is Down or Recovering
• The Registration progress bar on the Domain registration page reads "N days left"
• Running whois example.com shows an expiry date within the next 30 days
• The site itself is still up and working normally

What it means

Your domain registration has 30 days or less before its expiry date. The domain hasn't expired yet and your site is still live, so the site isn't Down. At 7 days or less DomainDash opens an incident, and at 1 day it raises the severity. Nothing has broken yet, but it will if you don't renew.

Most registrars renew domains automatically if auto-renew is enabled and the payment method on file is valid. If you're seeing this warning, something may have slipped: auto-renew might be off, the card may be about to expire, or the renewal notification emails might have been going somewhere unmonitored.

Renewing now costs a standard annual fee. If you ignore this warning until the domain expires, you risk redemption fees, typically £60 to £160 on top of the renewal price, depending on the registrar. In the worst case you lose the domain permanently.

Common causes

• Auto-renew was disabled, often by accident during a payment method update or account settings change
• The credit or debit card on file is expired or has been cancelled
• Renewal notification emails are going to a former team member's address or to a shared inbox nobody checks
• A multi-year registration is coming to its end after a long period of no action
• The domain was transferred to a new registrar and auto-renew wasn't re-enabled afterwards

How to fix

1. Confirm the expiry date. Run whois example.com or check the site's Domain registration page in DomainDash to see how many days remain.

2. Log in to your registrar and renew. Find the domain in your account, click Renew, and complete the payment. Renewing while the domain is still active costs standard rates, so don't wait.

3. Update your payment method. Check that the card on file is valid. Update it if necessary, and confirm the billing email address is one your team actively reads.

4. Enable auto-renew. Turn it on if it's off, so future renewals happen automatically.

5. Store the new renewal date somewhere your team will see it. Add it to a shared calendar or infrastructure runbook, and set a reminder for 45 days before the next expiry.

How to verify

After renewing:

1. Run whois example.com and confirm the new expiry date is at least one year away.
2. In DomainDash, open the site's Domain registration page. At the next domain registration check, the expiry date updates and the status returns from Expiring or Expiring soon to Active, provided the new date is more than 30 days away.
3. Check that the Registration progress bar on the Domain registration page shows the new number of days left.

WHOIS data can take a short while to reflect the renewal once the registrar processes it, so the status may not update at the first check after you renew.

Related

• Domain expired — what happens if the warning window passes and the domain lapses
• Domain registration — how DomainDash tracks expiry dates and what the warning thresholds are
• How incidents work — how DomainDash alerts your team about expiry warnings