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I'm currently managing several domains and find it a pain to keep track of those expiry dates and make sure they get renewed. What I do now is to manually add those domains to a to-do manager with a reminder and check it say a month before expiry to remind myself (I do have auto-renew for some domains but not all).

If you have a better way to manage it, I'd be happy to hear about it. Thinking of solving my own problem by setting up a website to do it (if there is no better way). So here's a question: would you use such a web application where you just enter the domain names that you manage, and it will pull out the expiry automatically, adds a reminder say 2 months before expiry and keep reminding you till the whois record shows that it has been renewed?

This way I can be sure I won't miss any of those expiry dates. It is something I myself will use but would like to hear what you guys think? I found some online tools that does this but it doesn't seemed reliable or intuitive enough (e.g. advertisements all over).

Appreciate any inputs!

kizmat
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    Most registrars will e-mail you prior to expiration. Many also have an auto-renew feature. Have you checked the company you used to register your websites for a solution? – closetnoc Jun 24 '14 at 02:50
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    Yes most of my registrars have that, but because I'm managing domains from various registrars so I don't want to depend entirely on their reliability to email me. – kizmat Jun 24 '14 at 02:54
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    Gotcha! I have no idea. Back in the day when Network Solutions was the only game in town and they were less than desirable, I used to keep a simple text file on my desktop. Of course that is no better than what you are doing right now. If you run your own server somewhere, you can set up a cron job that will use echo to send and e-mail. Here is a link with an example: http://askubuntu.com/questions/332481/setup-cron-job-to-send-email-to-a-bunch-of-people-on-a-regular-basis – closetnoc Jun 24 '14 at 03:01
  • Thanks for the tip! Yes I run my own server. Just trying to gather if such an automated service will make sense to anybody else. – kizmat Jun 24 '14 at 03:04
  • Anytime! If you can write code, you can create a simple PHP or CGI application. I have Apache 2+ installed on my HP Netbook that I am using right now. I have tools, links, documentation, and so forth on my localhost site. For myself, I would write a simple script that could help. But I do these things almost routinely. – closetnoc Jun 24 '14 at 03:10
  • Most registrars do email; But sometimes they mess up. I just missed the expiry on one of my domains when active-domain 'upgraded' their system and stopped sending out alerts for a period of time. – Confused Vorlon Mar 18 '17 at 11:04
  • I am using https://uptime.onl/ for that. – Konstantin Bogomolov Apr 23 '21 at 05:16

4 Answers4

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Most registrars will allow you set your domains to auto-renew. I highly recommend this for any significant domain you own. The cost of renewal is trivial compared to the time spent trying to get the domain restored.

If you want monitoring, just search for domain expiration monitoring or whois monitoring. Many companies provide both domain expiration monitoring, whois histories and more.

jeffatrackaid
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  • The ideal would be to have https uptime, https certificate expiry and domain expiry in one place. Does something like that exist? – Alper May 12 '21 at 12:54
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My registrars have always sent me notices when a domain is going to expire but to be safe I have also used my gmail account and added the expire dates there as well. Google will send me an SMS as well as the event showing on my cell phone's calendar. You can set up multiple notifications too. I only have a two week notice but you could do 2 weeks, 1 week and 24 hours (if you like to cut it short).

Dave Lozier
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    Thanks, by Gmail you mean Google Calendar? That's how I'm setting it up also. Downside is I don't have an snapshot/overview of all the domains that I have. – kizmat Jun 24 '14 at 03:41
  • @kizmat: Do you use a separate calendar just for domain renewal? In which case, the Agenda view should give you a reasonable "overview" of all your domains. – MrWhite Jun 24 '14 at 09:24
  • You should turn this into an organizational process that is owned by multiple people and probably is reviewed at least twice a year. – Alper May 12 '21 at 12:54
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I use this domain check script which I run from a cron job. It will send me email when domains are about to expire: http://prefetch.net/code/domain-check

I also run this similar ssl certificate check script: http://prefetch.net/code/ssl-cert-check It performs the same function, but for SSL certificates.

Stephen Ostermiller
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Usually my web host service send me an email as a reminder. So there is no issue with this. I renew the domain in this case.

Freelance Web Developer
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