Why domain expiry monitoring matters
When a domain registration expires, everything that depends on it stops at once: the website, email, APIs and every TLS certificate for that domain. Uptime monitoring tells you after the fact; domain-expiry monitoring tells you weeks before.
Domains usually lapse for ordinary reasons rather than negligence:
- The card on file at the registrar expired, so auto-renew failed.
- Renewal notices go to a former employee, an agency or a personal inbox nobody reads.
- The domain was registered years ago on a multi-year term and everyone forgot the date.
- Different domains sit at different registrars with different renewal settings.
Registrars typically allow a grace and redemption period after expiry, but the rules and fees vary by registry and registrar, and some domains can be lost to the next buyer. An independent warning, sent to channels your team actually watches, is cheap insurance.
Domain-expiry monitoring is especially important for small businesses and online stores, where the website and email often share one domain and one person handles renewals.
How Uptime Tracker reads expiry dates
Uptime Tracker looks up the registration expiry date using RDAP (Registration Data Access Protocol), the standardized, machine-readable replacement for WHOIS. The IANA bootstrap registry tells the checker which RDAP server is authoritative for each top-level domain, so the date comes from the registry's own published data rather than from scraping text.
A few details are worth knowing:
- Check frequency. Expiry data is rechecked roughly every hour. Registry responses are cached for up to 12 hours, which is more than fast enough for a date that changes once a year and avoids hammering registry servers.
- Renewals show up automatically. After you renew, the new expiry date appears once the registry publishes it and the cache refreshes.
- Unknown is honest. Some country-code and niche registries do not publish RDAP expiry data. In that case the monitor shows the expiry as unknown instead of guessing. For those domains, note the expiry date from your registrar manually.
Domain-expiry monitors watch the registered domain, such as example.com. Subdomains like shop.example.com share the parent's registration and do not need their own expiry monitor, though each still deserves an HTTPS monitor for its certificate.
Choosing the right warning window
For most domains a 30-day warning, the default, gives enough time to fix a failed payment or reach whoever controls the registrar account. You can set any value from 1 to 90 days per monitor.
| Situation | Suggested warning |
|---|---|
| Domain on auto-renew with a company card you control | 30 days |
| Registrar account owned by a client, agency or former employee | 60 to 90 days |
| Domain that needs a purchase order or finance approval to renew | 90 days |
| Low-value or test domain | 7 to 14 days |
Route warnings deliberately. A domain warning is not an emergency at 3 a.m., so on Starter and Team you can use routing rules to send it to email or a team Slack channel during business hours, while keeping SMS for real outages. See alerts and notifications for routing by tag, monitor, event and time window.
When the warning arrives, renew and then confirm on the monitor that the new date has been picked up. If the date has not changed after a day, check that the renewal completed at the registrar.
Set up domain expiry monitoring
Adding a domain-expiry monitor takes about a minute per domain on Starter or Team.
- Sign in and create a new monitor with the type Domain expiry.
- Enter the registered domain, for example
example.com, withouthttps://or a path. - Set the warning window between 1 and 90 days, or keep the default of 30.
- Choose where warnings go, and add a tag such as
domainsif you want routing rules to treat them differently. - Check that the monitor shows a registration expiry date. If it shows unknown, the registry does not publish RDAP data for that domain.
Repeat for every domain you own, including the ones that only redirect. Old marketing domains and typo domains are often the ones that lapse unnoticed, and a lapsed redirect domain can end up in someone else's hands.
Pair each domain with HTTPS monitors for its public hostnames to cover certificates as well. The SSL certificate monitoring page explains how the two checks complement each other.
What's included on each plan
Domain-expiry monitors are available on Starter ($9/month) and Team ($49/month) and count toward the plan's standard monitor limit.
| Free | Starter | Team | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Domain-expiry monitors | No | Yes | Yes |
| Standard monitors (shared with other check types) | 2 | 10 | 50 |
| Warning window | — | 1 to 90 days | 1 to 90 days |
| SSL certificate validation on HTTPS checks | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Routing rules for warnings | No | Yes | Yes |
Because domain-expiry monitors count as standard monitors, plan for one per registered domain. A small business with two or three domains uses two or three of Starter's 10 monitors, leaving the rest for website, DNS and port checks. An agency tracking a dozen or more client domains alongside their website checks will usually want Team's 50.
Warnings use the same channels and routing rules as downtime alerts, so you can send them to a shared inbox or a finance contact rather than the on-call engineer. You can try domain-expiry monitoring with the 14-day Team trial, no card required. See the pricing page for details.
