Domain

The Domain Check asks the registry when your domain registration expires, and tells you before it does.

It asks about the domain you registered, not the full name in the Monitor’s address: for shop.acme.co.uk we ask about acme.co.uk.

How often we read it

We look the registration up at the same time each day: each lookup comes 1 day after the one before. A new Monitor gets its first lookup straight away. We ask the registry ourselves, not from your Monitor’s locations, and one lookup serves every Monitor on the same domain.

The Checks card shows when the registration expires, the registrar, and when it was last read.

Warnings before it expires

The Check warns 30 days and 7 days before it expires. Each warning is said once, and a registration we first read with fewer days left is warned about once, at the nearest of those days.

Warnings arrive in the daily digest, at 09:00 in your Project’s timezone. When you renew the domain, its expiry date moves on, and the warnings start again for the new date. A warning still waiting for the digest when you renew is not sent.

When it fails

The Check fails once the expiry date has passed. It opens an Incident and alerts you. It does not count against your uptime, and it does not show on your Status page.

When your server has stopped answering too, you hear the uptime alert first. The Domain Check’s failure waits behind it, and is looked at again once your Monitor is up. If the domain is fine by then, you never hear about it. If it is still expired, you hear about it after the message that says your Monitor is up again.

When the registry cannot be read

Registries are sometimes slow or out of service. A lookup that fails is judged against the last expiry date we read, and is never worse than a warning, so a registry that cannot be read never opens an Incident.

After 3 lookups in a row fail, the Check warns once that the registry cannot be read. The warning names the registry and the day we last read it, and says nothing about when the domain expires, because we do not know. The next lookup that works ends it.

When there is no Domain Check

Some Monitors have no Domain Check. The Monitor’s create screen, and its Checks card, say why.

An address given as an IP address, and not as a name, has no domain to read:

Not available: an IP address has no domain registration to read.

Some registries do not publish the expiry dates of their domains in a form we can read:

Not available: this domain's registry does not publish an expiry date we can read.

A name with no registered domain of its own, such as a single word, has none either:

Not available: this address has no registered domain of its own.