Domain expiry monitoring and alerts for every client site

You hear about a client's domain from OctoPing weeks before it lapses.

Why domains lapse

Registrars send renewal reminders to the contact on file. When that contact is a former employee, a developer who moved on, or an address from the day the domain was bought, the reminder goes unread. Auto-renew fails just as quietly when the card on file expires. In our experience the first sign is a client calling to say the site and their email are down.

What OctoPing checks

Every new site has domain monitoring switched on. OctoPing reads the public registration record for the domain behind the site, so shop.example.com is checked as example.com. It asks the registry over RDAP and falls back to a classic WHOIS lookup when a registry doesn't offer RDAP. Because the record is public, you can watch a client's domain without a registrar login.

The default is one lookup every week. You can choose every day, every week, every 2 weeks or every month for each site. Every lookup stores the registrar, the creation, expiry and last updated dates, the registrant organization and country, the registry's status flags (such as transfer locks), the name servers and the DNSSEC status.

When it alerts

• Expiry. When the days left drop to your warning window or below. The window is 30 days unless you change it, and you can set anything from 1 to 365 days per site. The warning repeats on each lookup until the domain is renewed, so a message someone missed shows up again.
• Registration change. When the registrar, the registrant organization, the registrant country, the name servers or the status flags differ from the previous lookup. The first lookup sets the baseline, so adding a site doesn't trigger a change alert.

If the registry can't be reached or rate limits the lookup, OctoPing records the failure, tries again at the next scheduled check and doesn't alert.

What the alert says

The subject line names the domain and the days remaining. It carries a WARNING label at 14 days or fewer and URGENT at 7 days or fewer. The body gives the dates and the registrar so whoever reads it knows where to renew.

Website: https://example.com
Status: Domain registration expiring soon

Days until expiry: 12
Expiration date: 2026-12-01
Registrar: Example Registrar, Inc.

Please renew the domain registration before it expires to avoid losing the domain.

View details in OctoPing: <link to the site>

A change alert lists what moved, such as the old and new registrar or a note that the name servers changed. Alerts go out through the channels on the site's alert rules: email, Slack, Discord, webhook or browser push. Expiry warnings follow each channel's down-alert switch and change alerts follow its change-alert switch.

If you've added a client as a contact on a status page that shows the site, they get the expiry warning and the change alert too. Contacts get an expiry warning at most once every three days, while your own alert rules repeat it on every lookup.

How it fits the price

Every site gets domain expiry monitoring along with uptime, SSL and the other checks, and no plan limits which checks a site can use. Plans start at $19 a month for 20 sites. See pricing for the full list.

Every account starts with a 14-day free trial. No card required. Start your 14-day trial, add a client's site, and the checks you turn on start with it.