Your SSL certificate expires and you get browser warnings. Your server goes down and failover kicks in. Your domain expires and you might never get it back.
Domain expiration is different from other infrastructure failures. It's not a temporary outage you can fix with a restart or a configuration change. When a domain expires and someone else registers it, you're facing a legal battle, a ransom negotiation, or a complete rebrand. The domain you've built your business on for years can vanish because someone missed an email.
This happens constantly, and it happens to organizations that should know better. Companies with dedicated IT teams, startups with six-figure funding, agencies managing dozens of client sites. The pattern is always the same: a renewal notice got lost, an auto-renewal failed silently, and by the time anyone noticed, the damage was done.
What Actually Happens When a Domain Expires
The moment your domain expires, your entire online presence goes dark. Your website shows a parking page or an error. Every email to your domain bounces. Your APIs return connection failures, breaking integrations your customers depend on. If you're running e-commerce, every minute of downtime is lost revenue. If you're running a SaaS product, your customers' businesses are affected too.
But the immediate outage is just the beginning. If you catch the expiration within the first thirty days or so, most registrars offer a grace period where you can renew at the normal price. Miss that window and you enter the redemption period, where registrars charge anywhere from $100 to $300 just to get your domain back. This isn't a late fee—it's a recovery fee, and it's non-negotiable.
If you miss the redemption period, the domain enters pending delete status and eventually gets released to the public. This is where things get truly expensive. Domain auction services and squatters monitor expiring domains constantly. A domain with any traffic, any backlinks, any brand recognition will get snapped up within seconds of release. Now you're not negotiating with your registrar anymore—you're negotiating with someone who knows exactly how much that domain is worth to you.
The legal route exists but it's slow and expensive. Filing a UDRP complaint costs $1,500 to $5,000 in fees alone, takes months to resolve, and doesn't guarantee success. If the new owner can demonstrate any legitimate interest in the domain, you lose. Actual litigation costs even more and takes even longer.
The Patterns Behind Every Domain Disaster
When you look at how domain expirations actually happen, the same patterns emerge over and over. Understanding these patterns is the first step toward making sure they don't happen to you.
The most common culprit is registrar email going to the wrong place. Domains get registered with personal email addresses that nobody checks anymore. They get registered with role accounts like domains@company.com that nobody monitors. The person who originally set up the domain left the company three years ago, and their email forwards expired two years ago. The registrar is sending renewal notices exactly like they're supposed to, but nobody's receiving them.
Even when emails arrive, they often don't get acted on. Registrar renewal notices look exactly like marketing emails because they usually are—bundled with upsells for privacy protection, SSL certificates, and website builders. Gmail's spam filter doesn't distinguish between "50% off domain transfers" and "your domain expires in 7 days." Both look like promotional content. Both get buried.
Auto-renewal creates a dangerous false sense of security. You set it up once and assume you're protected forever, but auto-renewal depends on a payment method that stays valid. Corporate credit cards get reissued with new numbers. Finance departments switch payment vendors. Cards hit spending limits or get flagged for unusual activity. When auto-renewal fails, most registrars don't call you—they send another email to the same address that might not be monitored.
In organizations, the ownership problem is pervasive. IT assumes DevOps handles domains. DevOps assumes IT handles them. The founder who registered everything in 2015 is focused on strategy now, not infrastructure. Nobody explicitly owns domain management, which means nobody is explicitly responsible when something goes wrong. The domain renewal becomes everyone's assumption and nobody's action item.
Real Companies, Real Disasters
This isn't theoretical. Major organizations have lost control of their domains, and not because they lacked resources or expertise.
In 2015, Google briefly lost ownership of google.com. A former employee noticed the domain was available for registration and bought it for $12. Google got it back quickly—the buyer cooperated and donated his reward to charity—but the incident proved that even the most sophisticated technology company in the world can have gaps in domain management.
The Dallas Cowboys, a billion-dollar sports franchise with presumably unlimited resources, lost their domain when it expired and got snatched by an opportunist. They had to negotiate to get it back. Foursquare, at the height of its popularity with millions of users, forgot to renew foursquare.com and suffered a highly public outage.
These organizations had IT departments, operations teams, and the money to pay any renewal fee. What they didn't have was a system that made domain expiration impossible to miss.
Building a System That Actually Works
The solution isn't to try harder to remember renewals or to trust registrar emails more. The solution is to build systems where human attention isn't the only thing standing between you and disaster.
Start by knowing what you have. Most organizations don't have a complete inventory of their domains. There are the obvious ones that everyone knows about, and then there are the forgotten ones—the domain someone registered for a campaign three years ago, the domain that came with an acquisition, the test domain a developer set up and never decommissioned. You can't monitor what you don't know exists.
Centralize where possible. Every registrar you use is another account to secure, another dashboard to check, another renewal system to trust. If your domains are spread across five different registrars, you have five different potential failure points. Consolidating to one or two registrars won't eliminate risk, but it reduces the surface area dramatically.
Set up monitoring that doesn't depend on registrar emails. Third-party domain monitoring queries domain registration data directly and alerts you through channels you actually use—Slack, SMS, whatever gets your attention. This creates redundancy. If the registrar's email goes to spam, your monitoring still catches the expiration. If your monitoring has a bug, the registrar email still arrives.
Configure alerts that escalate appropriately. A domain expiring in 60 days deserves an email. A domain expiring in 7 days deserves an SMS. A domain expiring tomorrow deserves a phone call. Most people check email eventually; almost everyone responds to a text message.
Make renewal responsibility explicit. Someone's job description should include "ensure domains don't expire." Not as one item in a list of fifty responsibilities, but as a specific, named accountability. When something is everyone's job, it's nobody's job.
The Economics of Prevention
Domain monitoring costs somewhere between nothing and a few dollars per month. A single domain redemption costs $100 to $300. Losing a domain to auction can cost thousands or tens of thousands. Losing a domain that's core to your business can cost everything.
The math isn't complicated. Any domain that matters to your business is worth monitoring. The monitoring cost is negligible compared to the cost of any failure mode, and the peace of mind is worth more than the dollar amount suggests.
But the real value isn't in avoiding the worst case. It's in not having to think about it. Once you have monitoring set up and alerts configured, domain expiration moves from "thing that could destroy my business" to "thing that will never happen because I'll know about it months in advance." That mental freedom is worth the setup effort alone.
Your domains are the foundation of everything you do online. They're worth protecting with more than hope and memory.
Morten Pradsgaard is the founder of exit1.dev — the free uptime monitor for people who actually ship. He writes no-bullshit guides on monitoring, reliability, and building software that doesn't crumble under pressure.