Domain Expiry Lifecycle and Name Server Changes Explained
When your domain expires and you want to understand what happens next. This article explains the domain expiry lifecycle, auto-renewal process, parking behavior, name server changes, and how to restore the domain during the Renewal Grace Period.
Most registries follow a standard lifecycle pattern for domains registered in their namespace.
When a domain name expires, in general terms, it should ideally get deleted as it’s paid duration has ended.
However, in the interest of the registrant, the domain is temporarily auto-renewed at the registry to give the registrant a grace period to renew the domain. For this reason, the domain’s expiry date on whois would appear as extended by 1 year, but the registrar’s local database would still show the old expiry date.
Since the registrant hasn’t really renewed the domain, and that the domain’s renewal at the registry is done on a provisional basis and at the registrar’s cost, the domain’s nameservers are changed and pointed to the registrar’s chosen DNS servers where the domain is said to have been parked.
In simpler words, the following events occur when a domain name expires:
- Domain gets auto-renewed at the registry
- Domain gets parked after auto-renewal (i.e. nameservers are changed to parking DNS)
The domain would then resolve to a parking page with a renewal notice on top to indicate that the domain has expired (i.e. its paid duration has ended) and that the registrant needs to renew the domain in order to restore its full functionality.
Here's a screenshot of a parking page to illustrate what it looks like:
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The registrant is given 36 days (or as specified by the registrar) to give an explicit renewal request to the registrar. This 36 days period is referred to as the “Renewal Grace Period”.
If the registrant renews the domain with the registrar within the Renewal Grace Period, the registrar’s system performs the following actions to restore the domain’s full functionality:
- Change the domain’s nameservers back to what they were prior to parking the domain
- Extend the expiry date in their local database to match the expiry date at the registry
Since the domain was already auto-renewed earlier at the registry, the registrar doesn’t need to renew it again. They would simply flag it as “Renewed’ in their local database after the above actions have been performed.
If the registrant fails to renew the domain within the Renewal Grace Period, the domain would be queued for deletion and 6 days later the domain would be deleted.
Once the registrar deletes the domain name, the registry places the domain in the Redemption Period for 30 days. During this period, the registrant can restore the domain in case they want but restoring a domain is costly, time-consuming and rather a manual process, and hence registrants are advised to renew their domains well before expiry to avoid any downtime and heavy restoration charges later.