Domain Expiry Monitoring
An expired domain is worse than a crashed server
When a domain expires, the site disappears entirely — DNS stops resolving, email stops working, and recovering it can take days. Registrar renewal emails routinely go to old client inboxes. Sitewatch monitors every domain registration automatically via RDAP and alerts you 30 days before expiry — no WHOIS tools, no calendar reminders.
- 30-day early warning before domain expiry — critical alert at 7 days
- Automatic via RDAP — no WHOIS tools, no API keys, no configuration
- Monitors every domain in your client portfolio — added automatically when you add a site
01Why it matters
Domain expiry is the most catastrophic failure mode for a client site
Complete site loss
Unlike a server going down, an expired domain cascades. The site disappears, email stops working, DNS stops resolving — recovering it requires waiting for registry propagation and can take days.
Email stops working
When the domain expires, MX records stop resolving too. Client emails bounce. No one can reach the business during the outage. This is often worse than the website being down.
Registrar renewal emails fail silently
Renewal notices go to the email address on the registrar account — which is often the client's old personal email, a role address nobody checks, or gets filtered as spam. The agency never sees it.
Portfolio scale problem
One agency managing 30 client domains means 30 renewal dates, 30 registrar accounts, and 30 potential failure points. Manual calendar reminders are not a system.
Recovery takes time
An expired domain doesn't come back the moment you renew it. DNS propagation after recovery can take hours to days. The client's site may stay offline even after you pay.
No extra setup
Sitewatch extracts the apex domain from every site URL and queries RDAP automatically. No integration, no API keys, no WHOIS tools to manage.
02Paired with SSL monitoring
SSL expiry and domain expiry — monitored together
Both are expiry problems agencies need to track
SSL certificates expire and so do domain registrations. Both can take a client site offline — and both send renewal notices to inboxes nobody checks. Sitewatch handles both automatically so you're never caught off guard by either.
Both run on every check cycle
Domain RDAP queries and SSL certificate reads happen automatically on every monitoring cycle. No separate scans, no separate tools. Add a site once and both are covered immediately.
Both visible in one place
Domain expiry status and SSL certificate health appear alongside uptime, performance, and security signals in a single dashboard. One place to see the full health of every client site.
03What we detect
Two incident types cover every domain expiry scenario
Expiry warnings
- DOMAIN_EXPIRING — fires at 30 days (high) and escalates at 7 days (critical)
Expired domains
- DOMAIN_EXPIRED — fires a critical incident on the expiry date
Registration metadata
- Registrar name and contact info stored per site. RDAP lookup result cached and refreshed on every monitoring cycle.
04How it works
Domain monitoring runs automatically on every site
- 01
Domain extracted from site URL
Sitewatch extracts the apex domain from every site URL you add (e.g. example.com from https://example.com/pricing).
- 02
RDAP query runs automatically
The domain is queried via RDAP — the modern, structured successor to WHOIS. No API key required. No third-party tools.
- 03
Expiry date tracked continuously
Expiry date is stored and tracked continuously. High severity alert fires 30 days before expiry. Critical alert fires at 7 days.
- 04
Critical incident on expiry
If the domain expires, a critical incident is created immediately with registrar info and expiry date.
05What you get
Outcomes, not a feature list.
Never lose a domain to a forgotten renewal.
A lapsed domain takes everything down at once — the site, the email, the logins — and getting it back can be expensive or impossible. It is also entirely predictable. Sitewatch tracks the registration itself and warns you a month out.
30 days
Early warning before expiry
7 days
Critical alert threshold
Every site
Domain monitored automatically
Start monitoring domain expiry across your entire client portfolio
Free plan. 1 site. Domain and SSL monitoring included. No credit card.
06FAQ
Domain expiry monitoring questions
When a domain expires, the registry stops serving DNS records for it. The site goes down completely — not just the web server, but email, subdomains, and anything else running on that domain. Recovery requires renewing through the registrar, then waiting for DNS propagation, which can take hours to days. This is more disruptive than a server outage because you cannot fix it quickly.
WHOIS requires manual lookups for each domain. Agencies managing 30 client domains would need to check each one individually, remember to do it regularly, and parse inconsistently formatted WHOIS responses. Sitewatch queries RDAP (the structured, API-based successor to WHOIS) automatically for every domain in your portfolio.
RDAP (Registration Data Access Protocol) is the standardized successor to WHOIS. It returns structured JSON data directly from the domain registry — more reliable, more consistent, and no scraping required. Sitewatch uses RDAP because it's the most accurate source for domain registration data.
RDAP coverage depends on the domain registry. Most major TLDs (.com, .net, .org, .io, and most country-code TLDs) are supported. Some registries that haven't implemented RDAP yet may fall back to WHOIS parsing.
Yes. Domain expiry monitoring is included on every plan including the free plan, for every site you monitor.
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