When the Renewal Notice Goes to a Dead Address

How the notice system works

Registrars are required to attempt notification before a domain expires. Most send several messages over the preceding month, and another during the grace period afterwards.

Every one of them goes to the registrant contact address recorded on the domain.

Not to whoever pays. Not to the business. To the address in the registration record, which was typed in once, possibly by somebody else, possibly a decade ago.

Which is why businesses insist truthfully that they were never warned, and registrars respond truthfully that four notices were sent.

The four ways the address fails

• It belonged to somebody who left. The mailbox was closed and nothing forwards.
• It forwards to somebody who left. Worse, because the forwarding still works and lands in an abandoned inbox.
• It is at a provider you no longer use. Common where a business changed email host years after registering.
• It is filtered. The notices arrive and go straight to junk, because registrar mail looks like the phishing that imitates it.

The fourth is the most frustrating, because everything is technically correct. The address works, somebody reads that mailbox, and the message is in a folder they never open.

What actually happens on expiry

Not instant deletion, which is the one piece of good news.

The domain stops working. The site goes down and mail stops arriving, usually within hours, and that is how most businesses find out.

Then there is a grace period during which the registrant can renew at the normal price. Length varies by registrar and extension.

After that comes a redemption period, where recovery is still possible at a substantially higher fee, typically many times the annual cost.

Only after both does it become available to anybody. So the situation is recoverable for a while, and expensive rather than fatal, provided somebody notices.

The cost, itemised

Worth being specific, because it is larger than the renewal fee.

The redemption fee itself, if you are past the grace period. Every hour the site and email are down. The enquiries sent during that window, which bounce and are never seen. The customers who tried, found nothing, and called somebody else.

And the administrative time, which for a business without clear ownership records can run to days.

For most small businesses the redemption fee is the smallest line on that list.

The worst version

Where the domain drops entirely and somebody else registers it.

Names with any history are watched by services that register them the moment they become available. A domain with inbound links, traffic and an established name is precisely what they look for.

At that point your options are buying it back at whatever they ask, or changing your name. Neither is good, and there is no process that helps unless you have a trademark claim.

This is uncommon and it is not rare, and it is the reason the whole subject is worth ten minutes of prevention.

A worked example

An accountancy firm whose domain expired in the second week of April.

The registration had been made by a partner who retired in 2016. His firm address had been closed and set to forward to a general inbox, which was itself replaced when they changed email provider in 2018.

Every renewal notice for two years had been delivered into nothing.

The domain had been renewing automatically on his old personal card until it expired, at which point the auto-renewal silently failed and the notices went where they had always gone.

The site and email went down on a Tuesday in tax season. It was recovered within the grace period, which cost the normal fee plus two days of a partner's time and a morning of clients unable to reach anybody.

The fix afterwards took fifteen minutes: registrant contact changed to a shared address, a current business card on file, and a calendar reminder six weeks before renewal.

The ten minute check

1. Look up your own domain and read the registrant contact address.
2. Send a message to it and confirm somebody receives it.
3. Check the expiry date and note it in a calendar.
4. Confirm auto-renewal is on.
5. Check which card is stored, and its expiry.
6. Search your mail for the last renewal notice. If you cannot find one, they are not reaching you.

The sixth is the definitive test, and almost nobody runs it. A notice you cannot locate is a warning system that does not exist.

Auto-renewal is not the whole answer

Worth stating because it is treated as one.

Auto-renewal fails when the card expires, when the card is declined, when the card belongs to somebody who left, or when the account holding it is closed.

In every one of those cases the fallback is the notification, sent to the address that does not work. Two systems, both broken, in the same silent way.

The combination that actually holds: auto-renewal on, a business card that is not tied to one person, a contact address more than one person reads, and a calendar reminder as the human backstop.

Registering for longer

The simplest structural improvement.

A domain can usually be registered for up to ten years in advance. Every additional year removes one opportunity for the renewal to fail.

The cost is the same per year; you are paying earlier rather than paying more. For a name your business depends on, five years is cheap insurance and one decision instead of five.

It also means the card on file matters less, because it is used a fifth as often.

Where the reminder should live

Not in your head, and not only in the registrar's system.

Put the expiry date in whatever calendar the business actually uses, six weeks ahead, with the registrar name in the entry. Six weeks gives room to sort out a declined card without urgency.

Add the same entry for the hosting renewal and the certificate, since those are the other two dates that take a site offline and they rarely fall in the same month.

Invite a second person to the calendar entry if there is one. A reminder that only reaches the person on holiday is the same failure in a different form.

Who else should know

The last piece, and it applies even to a business of one.

Somebody other than you should know which registrar holds the domain and how to reach the account. Not the password necessarily, but the map.

Because the scenario this is really guarding against is not carelessness. It is you being unavailable for three weeks at the wrong moment, which is a far more ordinary event than losing a domain through negligence.

The wider version of that record is covered in who holds the keys to your site.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.