Every Domain Name registration period ends sooner or later. You have to renew your Domain before its expiration date to make sure you keep your web site up and running in a normal way. Just a friendly reminder, always make sure that you provide the correct personal and contact information to the Registrar. When your Domain Name is about to expire, you will receive at least couple expiry notifications from your Registrar during two months period prior expiration date.

Different stages what the expired Domain Name goes through.

1)Renewal Grace Period

The very first period for the Domain Name, right after it expired, is called Renewal Grace Period.During this period the Domain is not active and all services are terminated.The Renewal Grace Period is 40 days for .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz,.us, and .name extensions and there is none such period for Domain Names with extension .cn. You can still renew your Domain during this period at the normal costs. The renewal might take up to 2 business days.

2)Redemption Grace Period

The second period is called Redemption Grace Period. It lasts 30 days and it is your last chance to renew your Domain Name. The Domain stays inactive with all services being interrupted. Only your Registrar has the rights to redeem the Domain Name. You can renew it talking directly to the support team of your Registrar and paying Redemption Period Fee which cannot be waived due to Registry Policy. The Domain Name restoration during this period might take up to 3-4 business days.

3)Pending Delete Status

After these two Grace Periods your Domain Name goes into Pending Delete Status for five days. During this period the Domain is marked for deletion by Registry and cannot be renewed. In a five days period Domain is deleted and available for registration by other parties. Some of the Domain Name’s extensions, such as .de, don’t get any Grace Periods at all and get deleted and available for new public registration right after their expiration date. Domains with .uk extension are held only until 25th day of the month after they expire. But those are few. If you have to clarify you situation you can always contact the domain registrar.

How long is the redemption period?

The domain name enters redemption 30-40 days after it has expired. This redemption period lasts another 30 days, followed by the domain being in a pending delete state for 5 more days. After these 35 days (65-75 days from the date of expiration), the domain is returned to the Internet; however, the domain is almost always purchased by squatters. Generally, the domain will be immediately purchased by squatters and made available for sale for hundreds and even thousands of dollars. If you want to ensure that you retain ownership of the domain, you must pay the redemption fee to recover the domain.The cost to retrieve a domain from redemption varies from $100 to $300 and depends on the registrar. The recovery process takes approximately 5 days to complete.

What is the redemption fee?
The redemption fee is the cost to obtain a domain from redemption. The fee is to cover the costs of the paperwork that the registrar must file to recover the domain. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) provided no guidelines on how much the registrar should charge to recover a domain from redemption, so these fees vary from under $100 to over $300.The process of recovering the domain takes approximately 5 days. We must receive the redemption fees before we will start the process of recovering the domain with our registrar.

Can an expired domain be transferred?

A domain cannot be transferred once it has expired; not even internally with the same registrar. The domain will need to be renewed first and once it is active again, it can be transferred to any registrar. A domain transfer can take 5 to 7 days to complete. For this reason, the transfer process be started at least 2 weeks before the domain is due to expire.

Article Authored by Niyas

Author, Niyas, is a Systems Engineer with SupportPRO. Niyas specializes in Cpanel, Plesk and Linux servers. SupportPRO offers 24X7 technical support services to Web hosting companies and service providers.