How to monitor

How to monitor domain expiry

A lapsed domain registration takes your whole site, email and everything else offline instantly — and it's completely preventable. Here's how to monitor domain expiry.

StatusCat2 min read

Of all the ways to take your site offline, letting the domain registration lapse is the most avoidable — and the most painful. When a domain expires, everything tied to it disappears at once: the website, email, APIs, subdomains. And unlike most outages, recovery can be slow, expensive, or in the worst case impossible if someone else grabs the name.

The fix is a simple check that warns you weeks ahead.

Why domains expire on you

Auto-renew exists, but it fails quietly:

  • The card on file expired or was declined.
  • Renewal notices went to an old or unmonitored email.
  • Auto-renew was off (or got disabled during a registrar change).
  • A transfer between registrars left renewal in limbo.

In each case, nobody notices until the domain is gone.

What to monitor

  • Domain registration expiry — the date your ownership of the name lapses. This is the big one.
  • DNS resolution — so you also catch record-level problems (see how to monitor DNS).
  • SSL certificate expiry — the other silent catastrophe, monitored separately (see SSL expiry).

Set it up in StatusCat

  1. Add a domain-expiry monitor for each domain you own.
  2. Set two thresholds — 30 days for an early heads-up, 7 days as a hard deadline (give yourself even more runway than you would for a certificate).
  3. Route alerts to a channel a human reads — and ideally more than one person, so a single inbox isn't a single point of failure.
  4. Cover every domain, including ones you only use for email or redirects. Those are the easiest to forget and just as damaging when they lapse.

The three silent catastrophes

Domain expiry, DNS failures, and SSL expiry share a nasty trait: each is rare, each takes your whole site offline instantly, and each is completely preventable with a cheap check. Monitoring all three is some of the highest-value, lowest-effort insurance you can set up.

StatusCat covers domain expiry, SSL expiry and DNS alongside HTTP, TCP, keyword and heartbeat checks, free for 50 monitors. New to this? Start with what uptime monitoring is.

Frequently asked questions

Isn't auto-renew enough for my domain?
Auto-renew helps, but it fails silently more often than people expect — an expired card, a changed billing email, a registrar transfer, or a disabled auto-renew setting. Monitoring is the backstop that tells you the renewal didn't happen while there's still time to fix it.
How is domain expiry different from SSL expiry?
They're separate. An SSL/TLS certificate secures the connection; the domain registration is your ownership of the name itself. Both can lapse independently, and both take your site offline — so monitor both.
How far ahead should I be warned?
Warn at least 30 days out, and again at 7 days. Domain recovery after expiry can be slow and expensive (and in the worst case, someone else registers it), so early warning matters even more than with certificates.

Keep reading

GuidesHow to monitor SSL certificate expiry (and never get caught out)Expired TLS certificates cause instant, total outages — and they're completely preventable. Here's how certificate expiry monitoring works and how to set it up in minutes.GuidesHow to monitor an API (the right way)A 200 response doesn't mean your API works. Here's how to monitor an API properly — status, latency, payload correctness, auth and SSL — so you catch real failures before your customers do.GuidesHow to monitor a cron job (with heartbeats)Cron jobs fail silently — the job stops, the server reboots, a deploy breaks the schedule, and nobody notices until data is missing. Here's how heartbeat monitoring catches it.