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How to never lose a domain

Companies lose domains they've owned for decades — through an expired credit card, a defunct inbox, or the one employee who managed the registrar account moving on. Foursquare, the Dallas Cowboys and even Google (briefly, in Argentina) have all had expiry incidents. None of it is bad luck; all of it is process failure. Here's the process that fixes it.

1. Auto-renew on, with a payment method that won't rot

• Turn on auto-renew for every domain you'd mind losing. This is the single highest-value setting.
• Auto-renew fails silently when the card expires. Add a backup payment method, or use PayPal/account credit where the registrar supports it.
• Diarise card-expiry month: the registrar is one of the things to update.

2. Register for multiple years

Renewing important domains for 5–10 years costs little and converts an annual ritual that can fail into a rare event. (Maximum registration is typically 10 years.) Some SEO folk claim long registrations help rankings — Google says no — but the operational safety alone is worth it.

3. Fix the contact-email trap

The classic death spiral: the registrar's renewal warnings go to an email address on the expiring domain. The domain lapses, email dies, and every subsequent warning vanishes into the void.

• Set the registrar account email to an address on a different domain (or a Gmail/Outlook address).
• Add a second contact if your registrar supports it.

4. Treat the registrar account like a bank account

• Unique password + two-factor authentication, always.
• Keep transfer lock (clientTransferProhibited) on. For business-critical names, ask about registry lock.
• Make sure more than one person in the organisation can access it — key-person risk loses domains too.

5. Independent monitoring (because settings drift)

Everything above lives inside the registrar. Add one layer outside it:

• Track your domains on our free dashboard — expiry dates and drop estimates in one list, refreshed automatically.
• Set email reminders at 30 days and 7 days before each expiry. If auto-renew worked, the email costs you two seconds. If it didn't, it saves the domain.

If the worst happens anyway

Move fast and follow the stage-by-stage playbook in How to recover an expired domain — the earlier in the lifecycle you act, the cheaper and more certain the recovery.