Domain monitoring

A lapsed domain is the rare failure that takes down everything at once: website, API, email, and every subdomain — including the email address your registrar's renewal warnings were being sent to. It is also uniquely embarrassing, because the fix costs a few dollars and the cause is always the same: nobody was watching.

Domain expiry monitoring is the cheapest insurance in your stack. FourSight queries the registry's own data on a schedule, counts down the days, and routes alerts through the same channels as the rest of your monitoring — so the warning reaches your on-call rotation, not a forgotten inbox.

Almost never because someone decided to let them go — always because the renewal pipeline broke without telling anyone. The credit card on file at the registrar expired. The employee whose email was on the account left the company. Renewal notices went to an address behind a WHOIS privacy service, or into spam, or to an agency that built the site five years ago. Auto-renew was switched off during a billing dispute and never switched back on.

The structural problem is that registrars notify the account owner, and account ownership drifts. Companies get acquired, teams reorganize, agencies hand off — and the domain, the single root dependency of the entire online business, quietly becomes something nobody owns. When it expires, most registrars park it; your site becomes an ad page, your MX records vanish, and depending on the TLD you may face redemption fees or, worse, a drop-catcher registering it before you can.

Monitoring breaks that failure chain by decoupling the warning from the registrar's contact records. FourSight alerts whoever is on call today — not whoever registered the domain in 2019.

RDAP (Registration Data Access Protocol) is the standardized successor to WHOIS, mandated by ICANN for gTLD registries. Where WHOIS returns free-form text that every registry formats differently — making automated parsing fragile and error-prone — RDAP returns structured JSON over HTTPS with defined fields for registration events, status, and entities. When FourSight reads an expiration event from RDAP, it's reading the registry's own machine-readable record, not scraping text and guessing at date formats.

Each FourSight domain check queries RDAP and stores the evidence: the exact expiration timestamp, the registrar of record, and the computed days remaining. That evidence is attached to every alert, so when the 60-day warning fires you can see at a glance which registrar to log into and how much runway you have.

RDAP vs legacy WHOIS for expiry monitoring

Property	RDAP	Legacy WHOIS
Response format	Structured JSON — reliable to parse	Free-form text, varies by registry
Transport	HTTPS	Port 43 plaintext
Expiry date field	Defined "expiration" event	Inconsistent labels and date formats
Standardization	IANA/ICANN mandated for gTLDs	Legacy, being phased down

The default alert ladder is 90, 60, 30, and 10 days before expiry, and the thresholds are configurable per monitor. The ladder is spaced for how organizations actually fix domain problems: 90 days is enough time to chase down who controls the registrar account (often the real bottleneck), 60 days covers procurement and card updates, 30 days is a firm escalation, and 10 days is the final page that treats it as an emergency.

Because alerts flow through FourSight's normal notification channels — email, Slack, webhook, and SMS on higher plans — and can be attached to escalation policies, the warning lands with your current team, escalates if unacknowledged, and shows up in the same incident timeline as everything else you monitor.

Tip: Monitor every domain you depend on, not just the primary: redirect domains, regional TLDs, the domain your transactional email sends from, and the vanity domains marketing registered for campaigns. At flat plan pricing, each one is just another monitor.

Auto-renew is the first line of defense and you should absolutely have it on. But auto-renew is a billing feature, and billing fails: cards expire, banks flag the charge, the account holder leaves, registrars change payment processors. Auto-renew also silently fails when the registrar can't charge you and its warning emails go to a dead address — which is precisely the scenario that takes companies offline.

The right model is layered: auto-renew as the mechanism, multi-year registration where it makes sense, and independent monitoring as the verification that the mechanism is still working. FourSight's RDAP check doesn't care what your registrar's billing system believes — it reads the registry's expiry date and counts down. If auto-renew silently failed, the countdown reveals it months before impact.

Domain expiry is one leg of a three-legged stool of "boring failures that take everything down": the domain registration, the DNS records the domain serves, and the TLS certificate on top. FourSight covers all three — domain expiry via RDAP, DNS drift detection, and SSL expiry with host-mismatch checks — plus HTTP, keyword, ping, port, and heartbeat monitoring, all on the Growth plan at $40/mo flat.

That bundling matters because these failures cluster: a domain approaching expiry often signals an unowned registrar account, which usually means unowned DNS and certificates too. One dashboard watching all three closes the whole class of problems.

Included in Growth — $40/mo flat

Put a countdown on every domain you own

Domain expiry monitoring is included in the Growth plan with all eight check types — RDAP-based checks, configurable thresholds, and alerts that reach your on-call rotation instead of a dead inbox.

• RDAP-based expiry checks with registrar and days-remaining evidence
• Alerts at 90, 60, 30, and 10 days — configurable per monitor
• Routes through escalation policies, Slack, webhook, email, and SMS
• Flat plan pricing — monitor every domain, redirect, and vanity TLD you hold

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