I got one of those messages from GoDaddy this morning to remind me that a domain was expiring.
I get those often, because I have nearly 200 domains, and often buy them a year at a time, so I can easily dump them if I don’t want them anymore.
Typically, I’ll just look through the domains expiring for the next couple months and extend them or leave them alone. But I got concerned that one would slip through the cracks.
So today, I did an audit of all of my domains, many that I wanted to keep were not on auto-renewal, and a lot of the dopey ones were on auto-renewal.
I trimmed hundreds of dollars off my domain bills for the coming months, and avoiding missing the renewal of some others. When that happens, you can still grab the domain back from GoDaddy (that’s who I use, but probably similar at other registrars), but they’ll charge you a premium.
I’d encourage everybody to make it an annual habit to audit their domains – it’s my new January 1 thing, just like I change the smoke alarm batteries when the clocks change.