RadardueHow to track domain renewals for your clients
When a domain lapses, the website, email and every certificate on it go with it. Domains rarely expire because nobody cared. They expire because the renewal email went to someone who left, or the card on a registrar account nobody remembers had expired.
Why client domains slip
- The registrar account belongs to the wrong person. A former employee, the web designer from five years ago, or the client's personal email.
- Auto-renew failed quietly. The card expired, a payment was declined, or auto-renew was never switched on for a domain moved between registrars.
- Domains are spread across registrars. One client can easily have domains at three different registrars, each with its own renewal date and reminder emails.
- Nobody owns it. The client assumes you renew it; you assume the client does.
Where expiry dates come from
Don't rely on a spreadsheet you update by hand. Every domain's registration expiry is published by its registry. For generic top-level domains such as .com, .net and .org, RDAP (the Registration Data Access Protocol) is now the official way to look it up, replacing the old WHOIS service with structured, consistent data. Many country-code domains publish RDAP too; a few still only offer WHOIS or a web lookup, so record those dates by hand.
Reading the date from the registry, rather than the registrar's dashboard, also catches the domain you didn't know was registered somewhere else.
What happens after a domain expires
For most generic domains, expiry isn't instant loss, but each stage is more expensive and more disruptive:
| Stage | Typical length | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Renewal grace | Varies by registrar, often up to about 30 to 45 days | The domain may stop resolving, but it can be renewed at the normal price. |
| Redemption | About 30 days | The domain can still be recovered, usually with a significant redemption fee. |
| Pending delete | About 5 days | It can't be recovered. Afterwards anyone can register it. |
Country-code domains follow their own registry's rules, and some have much shorter grace periods. Don't plan on any of them.
A process that holds up
- Inventory every client domain, including the ones only used for email, redirects or old campaigns.
- Record the registrar and the account owner for each, and move accounts to a shared or client-owned login, never one person's email.
- Turn on auto-renew and multi-year renewals for anything important, and check the payment method on file.
- Watch the registry expiry date automatically, and alert a shared channel 30 and 14 days out, then daily in the final week.
- Keep certificates and domains on the same list. They fail together, and the same people fix them.
- Show the client. A quarterly renewal report makes it clear who renews what.
How Radardue fits
Radardue reads each domain's expiry and registrar from the registry over RDAP, keeps it next to the client's certificates and other renewals, and alerts your team by email, Slack, Discord, Telegram or webhook before anything lapses. For domains without RDAP, add the date as a renewal. How domain checks work, or explore the demo.