When you register a domain name, it is leased to you for a period after which renewal is necessary. This period can be anywhere between 1 year to 10 years – billed annually. This means you cannot register a domain name for a few months. It has to be registered for an year or in multiple of years.

If for some reason you do not renew your domain name, the domain is passed through various stages and finally released to the marked for fresh registration.

This article will try to explain in a simplified way, the phases a domain goes though after it expires.

There are 5 stages of a domain life cycle:

• Available
• Active
• Grace Period
• Redemption Period
• Deletion Period

Available

A domain is said to be available if it is not leased to anyone at the moment, or if not reserved by the registry as a premium/reserved domain name. In this state, anyone willing and able can lease the domain though a process called Registration of a Domain. Domain registration is done via a Registrar. A domain that is in Available state cannot be accessed online on a browser or used to receive emails over the internet.

Active

A domain is said to be active if it has been registered by someone and is not expired. This means, a domain is active when the lease period has not elapsed. In this state, the individual or organization that registered the domain is said to be the Owner or Registrant of the domain and has full rights to it

Grace Period

A domain is in Grace Period if it is expired but is still within the time frame defined as grace period by the domain name’s Registry. For example, a .com domain’s grace period is 30 days. Therefore, if a .com domain was to expire, say on 10th Oct 2022, the period between 10th Oct 2022 and 10th Nov 2022 is what is called grace period.

During this period, the domain is still owned by the registrant person/organization. They are allowed to renew the domain and own it for another 1 year (or whichever number of years they renewed it for).

Depending on the domain extension (or TLD), a domain in grace period may or may not be accessible online. For instance, when a .com domain expires and is in grace period, your services used on the domain will be inaccessible. On the other hand, a .co.ke domain in grace period will still be accessible online as though it were active until the grace period elapses.

Redemption Period

This refers to a time after the grace period where the domain is still expired, but still available for renewal but at much higher prices. This prices are no longer called renewal fees but are now called redemption fees. Redemption fees can be upto 10 times as much as normal renewal fees. For instance, if normally I am to renew a domain for $12, its redemption fee may be as much as $120.

Due to this, it is recommended you make your renewals for domains early enough – not only to avoid downtime but also high prices for claiming back your domain once it reaches redemption period.

Deletion Period

This is the period when a domain is set to be deleted from the registry databases by their systems. During this time, a domain cannot be renewed or redeemed. No options are available to recover the domain except to let it be deleted from registry and thus made available again for registration.

But there is a catch! When the domain is released for fresh registration, anyone who is able and willing can then register it and claim it as their own. Between expiry and release of a domain, the time elapsed is between 75 days to 100 days.

Since anyone can purchase such a domain, a new business emerged – where people back order domains. This means, they pre-order a domain name that is about to be deleted so that when its deleted, it is immediately registered for them. That’s a gotcha!

You see, the danger of waiting for a domain to be released for you to register it afresh is that, someone may back-order your domain so that just a few seconds after its released, its registered to another person. If your domain was the brand of your company, its gone.

These are the stages a domain goes though in its lifecycle. From this you may conclude that:

Conclusion and Disclaimer

• It is critical to renew a domain you intend to keep early enough. You are allowed to renew domains way before they expire
• Once a domain expires, it goes through three phases: Grace period, Redemption period, Deletion period

The behavior described in the lifecycle above applies for most, but not all domains. Domains are administered by Registries – who are in charge of making the domains go live and be usable. Some registries, especially those running Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) such as .ke, .ng, .za etc apply different rules than the above. We recommend consulting with our Support Team on the different periods/stages of your country level domains and their behavior, especially if not able to renew in time.