Domain expired even though auto-renew was on: what happened and what to do

A domain can expire with auto-renew switched on, because auto-renew only works if the payment behind it goes through. On 3 October a client's .com.au expired with auto-renew on at the registrar, and the reseller account that pays for renewals held A$8.55. We found the site dead on 5 October. A renewal fixed it, and the domain came back within an hour. If your site and email both vanish together, check the domain's expiry before you check anything else.

What an expired domain looks like

Nothing about the site itself was broken. The code was fine and the hosting was running. The domain's registry status, however, was serverHold with the reason given as expired, and the domain was pulled out of DNS. Every network then answered that the domain does not exist.

That is different from a hosting fault. A host failure usually gives an error page or a timeout. An expired domain gives a not found error from everywhere at once, and the same thing happens to any email that uses the domain.

Two details make this hard to catch from the outside.

• Deploys keep working. We can still publish to the hosting platform while the domain is dead, so nothing in a normal update flags a problem. Only a domain lookup shows it.
• The status flag is not always bad news. A status of "server renew prohibited" on a .au domain is a normal registry setting, and not a warning. The one to worry about is serverHold.

Why auto-renew failed

The domain was registered through a wholesale registrar that we use as a reseller. Auto-renew was on, and the domain's expiry was recorded as 3 October at about 8:00 pm. The reseller balance at the time we looked was A$8.55. A renewal for a .com.au costs more than that, so the likely cause is that the payment could not be taken.

We say likely, because we cannot see the registrar's internal log. The same pattern had happened before. Auto-renew showing as on gives you a false sense of safety, and it only checks that you asked for renewal, not that the payment succeeded.

For a business owner the same failure usually has a plainer cause. The card on file expired, the bank declined the payment, or the renewal notice went to an email address nobody reads. The settings page still says auto-renew is on.

How fast it came back

We topped up the balance and renewed the domain on the evening of 5 October, at about 5:30 pm Sydney time. The registrar confirmed it, the expiry moved to October 2027 and the hold was cleared.

The public DNS answers did not clear immediately. For a while, some resolvers kept returning "does not exist", because networks remember a negative answer for a time. For .com.au domains that can be up to an hour.

We have timings from an earlier incident to compare. On 30 August, pagecog.com.au and a client domain both went on hold at the registry after their renewals lapsed. We noticed on 1 September. After renewal, the registry updated the records, and the .com.au zone republished the domains' delegations about 16 minutes later. Neither site needed any change to come back. During that outage we confirmed the sites themselves were healthy by sending a request straight to the server's address with the domain name attached, which proved the fault was DNS only.

Did it hurt the rankings?

For the one site where we can measure it, no. That site's domain expired on 11 August and was restored by 17 August. Its daily impressions through that week were 231, 198, 181, 137, 127, 183 and 183, flat against the weeks either side. Google appeared to keep serving its stored results during the hold.

That is a single site and a single week. We would not rely on it for a longer outage, and visitors and enquiries were lost for those days regardless of what Google showed.

What to do now

1. Check your expiry date today. Log in at the registrar and read the date, not the auto-renew switch. For a .au name, a WHOIS lookup at the registry shows the status and expiry for anyone.
2. Check what is paying. For a card, look at its expiry date. For a prepaid balance, check it covers the next renewal.
3. Use an email address that is not on the domain for registrar notices. If the domain dies, the email inside it dies too.
4. Put the date in a calendar a month before, with a reminder to check payment.
5. Know who the registrant is. If your web person registered it for you, you need to know that and be able to prove it. Our post on who actually owns your website covers that, and changing your domain name covers the opposite case, where you move on purpose.

What we do about it

Four domains we look after lapsed between August and October (one of them our own), so a regular expiry and balance check is the habit worth having. Flag any domain within 60 days of expiry, or a balance too low for the next renewals, before it matters. The related story of what we did when a host failed is in our post on host failures.

On our base plan we host your domain on Cloudflare and keep an eye on it for you, and the monthly fee is the reason we have an incentive to. See the web design service or get started if you want a site where somebody else is watching the dates.