I let a domain expire once. Now I check them all with a script.
A few years back I let a domain lapse. Not a throwaway one either. It was live, had traffic, and I just forgot the renewal date sitting in some registrar account I hadn't logged into in months. By the time I noticed, it was in redemption and cost me a small fortune to get back. The annoying part is that it was completely avoidable. I owned maybe fifteen domains at the time, spread across three…
Many years ago, the author allowed a domain to lapse, which turned out to be a costly mistake. They owned around fifteen domains across three registrars and didn't have a centralized way to track their expirations. To remedy this issue, they created a script that checks the expiration date of each domain listed in a file. The script uses the whois command to retrieve the expiration date and outputs the results, notifying the user if a domain is found or not.
To avoid overwhelming the whois servers, the script includes a two-second delay between lookups. The author now schedules this script to run weekly and sends the output via email, ensuring they stay on top of domain renewals. While the script works for a small number of domains, it has limitations, such as dealing with varying whois output formats and not checking DNS health.
The author eventually developed a more comprehensive tool called Domainium to address these issues, but for those with a small number of domains, the script provided can help prevent missed renewals.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
