Domain Renewal in India: How Not to Lose Your Name
An expired domain does not vanish immediately — but the window to recover it is shorter and more expensive than most people assume. Here is the timeline.
AvanceZone Technology · · 6 min read
Losing a domain you have used for years is one of the worst self-inflicted injuries a business can manage, and it happens for boring reasons: a card expired, a renewal notice went to an old inbox, the person who handled it left.
Here is what actually happens after expiry, and the four settings that prevent it.
The expiry timeline
Exact periods vary slightly by extension, but the shape is consistent.
Day 0 — expiry. The domain stops resolving. Your website goes down and, critically, your email stops arriving. For most businesses email is what makes this urgent rather than embarrassing.
Days 1–30 — grace period. You can usually still renew at the normal price. Most registrars keep the domain in your account throughout. This is the comfortable window and most recoveries happen here.
Days 30–60 — redemption period. The domain leaves your control. Only the original registrant can recover it, and there is a redemption fee set by the registry — typically several thousand rupees, far above a normal renewal. Restoration is manual and takes a few days.
Days 60–65 — pending delete. Nothing can be done. The domain is queued for release.
After that — anybody can register it. Including drop-catching services that watch expiring names with traffic, and occasionally competitors.
What it costs to get back
In the grace period, the normal renewal price — ₹599 for a .in, ₹1,199 for a .com. In redemption, the registry restoration fee applies on top, and it commonly runs several thousand rupees regardless of how cheap the domain was.
After deletion, the cost is whatever the new owner wants, if they will sell at all. For a name with real traffic, that can be a genuinely large number.
The four settings that prevent all of this
1. Register for multiple years. The simplest protection. A five-year registration removes four annual opportunities to forget. For a name your invoices depend on, this is cheap.
2. Keep the registrant email current — and make it a role address. Use domains@yourcompany.in or a shared inbox, never a personal address belonging to one employee. People leave; the domain stays.
3. Turn on auto-renew, and check the card. Auto-renew fails silently when a card expires. Diarise a card check every year — the auto-renew setting is only as good as the payment method behind it.
4. Diarise the expiry independently. Put the date in your own calendar with a reminder 45 days out. Do not rely solely on your registrar's emails reaching a working inbox.
How we handle reminders
We send renewal notices at 30 days and 7 days before expiry, with the exact amount, by email and by WhatsApp on the number on the account. Nothing is charged silently — you always know what is coming and what it costs.
You can check any domain's expiry date yourself at any time with a WHOIS lookup, including domains held elsewhere.
If you have already expired
Act today; the timeline above is unforgiving.
- Run a WHOIS to see the exact status — grace, redemption or pending delete
- Contact your registrar immediately and ask specifically for the restoration cost
- Pay it, even if it feels steep, if the name is on your printed material
- Once recovered, register it for several years and fix the email address on the account
If your current registrar is unhelpful, call us on +91-95851-60363. We cannot renew a domain held elsewhere, but we can read the WHOIS with you and tell you exactly which window you are in and how long you have.