Domain Expiration Was Not On Our Alerting Checklist

The call came at 6 AM on Monday. "The website is down." I checked the servers. Running fine. Checked the load balancers. Healthy. Checked the application logs. Normal traffic until Saturday, then... nothing. Then I checked the domain. It had expired on Friday. We were in the grace period, but the DNS had already stopped resolving. Some registrars do that — stop service immediately, then give you 30 days to renew at penalty rates. We renewed within the hour. DNS took another few hours to propagate. By the time everything was working, we'd lost three days of business, countless emails had bounced, and our customers thought we'd shut down. The worst part? The renewal email had gone to an employee who left two years ago. How Domains Get Lost Domain expiration seems like it should be impossible to miss. It happens once a year. Registrars send reminder emails. Auto-renewal exists. And yet, it happens constantly. Here's how: The email goes to the wrong person. Domains are registered by indivi