Confused about when your domain expires and when you need to renew it? You’re in the right place! At Epik, we try to streamline the process to make it easy to renew. To better understand how domain life cycles operate across the industry, check out our article, What is the Life Cycle of a Domain?
Registration, Transfer, and Prior to Renewal
When you register a domain with Epik, it’ll have a minimum one-year active status with a ten-year maximum (typical for most top level domains). If your transfer a domain in, it’ll have the remaining time leftover from the previous registrar, plus one additional year as a result of the transfer.
Prior to your Epik domain’s expiration date, you’ll receive a sequence of emails about our renewal process—and these emails will tell you if you have your domain set to AUTO or MANUAL renew. Renewing your domain extends the active status by one year.
Note: You can renew your domain for more than one year, but you can’t go beyond ten years total. In other words, if your domain name has one week of registration left, you can renew it up to nine years. You can’t renew for ten years, because then the name’s registration period would then be ten-years-plus-one-week, which is over the ten-year limit.
Epik’s Process for Expired Domains
At Epik, our process for expired domains is a little different than some other registrars. The biggest difference is how we handle expired domains.
When you reach your Epik domain’s expiration date, the domain will be presumptively renewed. You’ll have a thirty-day grace period to renew your domain before it is up for grabs. The day the domain expires is day 1 of the grace period. Occasionally a customer contacts us after the thirty-day grace period and wants to know if they can still get their domain back. Most of the time, we can accommodate them, although it will have the added cost of a redemption fee.
Eventually, any expired domains that aren’t renewed, are either sold off at auction using NameLiquidate or deleted.