Need to renew an expired domain on GoDaddy? You’ve got options.

Renew Expired Domains

The good news is that it can take a month or longer for GoDaddy to reclaim the domain and sell it to someone else. During that window, you can recover it and put it back in your account.

Further, as of August 31, 2013, GoDaddy (and all other registrars) is required to provide a service that notifies you of upcoming expired domains and gives you time to renew.

Even if you picked up a domains from an expired domain name auction, you will still have to renew the domain.

Though the best course of action is to renew domain names before they expire, life can get hectic, and these tasks can easily fall through the cracks.

This is especially true if you own hundreds of domains. Keeping track of them all can be a monumental task. This article will provide the tools and advice to help!

What to Do If Your Domain Expires

Depending on how long past the expiration date you wait, you may be able to repurchase your expired domains for no additional fees and without having to get extra help.

However, once you’ve used up the 19-day grace period, you’ll be subject to a redemption fee of $80.

According to GoDaddy's expiration timeline, 19 after expiration, your options become more limited (and expensive), but not all hope is lost. After 26 days, GoDaddy will put your domain up for auction with links to submit bids.

Until there’s a bid, you can still renew for the standard renewal fee. But, once a bid is placed, that option is off the table. To hold onto your domain, you’ll have to bid on it.

In case this part wasn’t obvious, don’t be the first bidder! You could inadvertently create a bidding war and either overpay for your domain or lose it altogether.

If no one bids in the initial auction, it goes to a closeout auction, where domain names are offered at a steep discount.

You can still renew your domain at this point by reaching out to GoDaddy for help, so make sure you go through the domain registration and checkout process instead of placing a bid.

The drop-dead date for renewing expired domains is 72 days. At that point, GoDaddy removes the domain from your account.

If you want it, you’ll have to repurchase it and hope that no one else has snapped it up.

And, if you need help at any point of the GoDaddy expired domain name auction process, the customer support team is second to none and always willing to help with these services via phone or chat.

How to Avoid the GoDaddy Expired Domain Renewal Process

Being proactive can avoid a lot of hassle. Hindsight is 20/20, though, so don’t beat yourself up if you let some domains expire. Instead, learn from the mistake and take one or more of these actions:

-      Sign up for auto-renewal services. You can “set it and forget it” by selecting to auto-renew a domain. Even if you don’t plan on keeping domains long-term, this is a smart play because it will help put you in control.

It’s better to pay for an extra year and sell the domain on your own terms than lose the domain entirely because you forgot to renew it.

-      Open and take action on correspondence from GoDaddy. They’ll typically send multiple expiration notices via email with convenient links and availability to chat.

-      Keep a credit card on file. If you have auto-renewal set up, GoDaddy will use your credit card data to renew automatically.

-      Track your domain renewals with a calendar or other monitoring tools. Whether you have one domain name in your account or one thousand, getting a calendar alert to renew can be a lifesaver.

Did You Know?

With Spamzilla, purchasing expiring domains is so much simpler as you can keep track of all your domains in one place, whether you purchased them from GoDaddy or elsewhere.

Using the Spamzilla dashboard, you can monitor the status of your own custom domains to see if any are close to expiring.