I have been using Domain Tools’ Domain Monitor for several years to get alerts when my clients’ domains are about to expire so I can warn them to renew. This is part of my WordPress managed hosting service and since I manage almost 200 websites I need a robust domain monitoring tool. The Domain Monitor service is going to be retired on September 30th 2024 so I’m sharing here my research on other options.
- Key features I am looking for:
- Monitor tracks domains (all TLDs) for impending expiration. less useful for me is to track changes in status
- Email alerts when monitored domains are approaching expiration
- Dashboard to organize monitored domains – perhaps link to Whois records
- Tracking SSL expiration is not an issue I need to worry about but might be of interest also
Domain Monitor used to be free but currently most alternative services are paid, the price depending on the number of domains monitored.
Many options:
- https://pingerman.com/ – they have a credit-based pricing and they claim that expiration monitoring for 100 domains should cost $7 per month.
- https://freedomainalerts.com/free – $19.00/month for 100 domains, $38.00/month for 500 domains.
- https://www.expirationreminder.net/pricing – $49/month for up to 250 tracked items.
- https://hetrixtools.com/pricing/uptime-monitor/ – $19.95/month for 60 domains, $49.95/month for 200.
- https://www.uptimia.com/pricing – $56/month for 50 domains, $229/month for 500 domains.
- https://uptimerobot.com/pricing/ – $29/month for 100 domains.
- https://www.site24x7.com/site24x7-pricing.html – $98/monthly for 100 domains.
- https://domain-monitor.io/pricing/ – $8/monthly for 100 domains.
- https://domainguard.app/pricing – $5.00/month for 75 domains, $25.00/month for 400 domains.
- https://www.remindax.com/pricing – It is free for up to 15 tracked items.
For 200 tracked items it is $29/month, and for 500 items it is $49/month . - https://updown.io – seems that you can’t turn off the server uptime monitor but the pricing is flexible based on how often server (and APDEX) is checked. If you don’t need more than 1h check interval, price is beterrn 0.61€/month and 1.83€/month for 100 websites (range depends on how many credits bought upfront)
- “Be alerted (at 10am) 14, 7, and 1 day(s) before your domains expire. We use RDAP and WHOIS, not all TLDs are supported. Might not be very useful if you have automatic renewal, unless you just want to keep an eye.”
- The site founder wrote to me with interesting details about the reliability of checking expiration via WHOIS: “You can’t select only the 1 day alert and this would not be reliable anyway. Because “…when you have auto-renew enabled, the registrar tends to update the WHOIS record very late, sometimes even after expiration date. For domains with no auto-renew the standard alerts starting at 14days will work fine. For domains with auto-renew enabled it’s fairly random, good behaved registrars will renew a couple weeks before expiration and you won’t get any alerts, other registrars will always show the record expiring in the WHOIS before updating it, which means you’ll always get false positive alerts”
Tracking an expired domain can be trickier than you might expect because there’s no universal way for domain registrars to mark a domain as expired. That said, in most cases, uptime monitoring services can catch an expiration because the domain typically gets replaced with a 404 (Not Found) or 402 (Payment Required) error page. You might also see the domain’s IP address removed from the DNS entirely — though detecting this takes a bit longer due to DNS caching.
But not all registrars handle expirations the same way. Here are some variations you should be aware of:
- Grace Period with Continued Hosting: Some registrars keep your website live even after the domain expires, reserving the domain for you so you can still renew it (often with an extra late-renewal fee). In this case, your site’s uptime remains unaffected, so an uptime check won’t catch the expiration. A WHOIS or RDAP lookup is the most reliable way to confirm the domain’s status.
- Parking Pages or Misleading Error Pages: Other registrars might replace your website with a generic parking page to monetize your traffic or a poorly implemented error page that still returns a 200 OK status code. Since the site technically stays online and returns a 200 OK, a default uptime monitor won’t register it as down. To catch this, you can configure your monitoring service to look for a specific search string that only appears on your legitimate website. This approach has the added benefit of detecting issues like site defacement or CMS errors that don’t affect HTTP status codes.
Understanding these nuances can help you choose the right monitoring strategy and avoid unpleasant surprises when a domain expires.
Another option is the Domain Control & Whois WWW application for iOS (or MacOS with M1). It has a free and a premium version, which gives you an unlimited domain count. The paid version is $1.49/month or $15.49/yearly. You can also pay $39.99 for a lifelong license. It allows easy import of a long list of domains but I found the SSL expirtion notices got in the way and I could not turn on notifications for all domains – I had to do that one at a time. Also it doesn’t refresh expirations dates automatically so that is a big limitation also. The language is also very confusing in the app. Not a great experience.
*The information about pricing in this article has been updated on August 20, 2024.
