Give domain renewal a little notice

Set up a renewal lookout

A registered domain and its TLS certificate need separate lookouts.

1. Open Monitors → Domains & DNS → Add monitor → Watch a domain. Choose Domain expiry.
2. Enter the exact registered domain, such as example.com, not www.example.com. Multi-label registrations such as example.co.uk must be entered in full.
3. Choose a warning window of 1–90 days; the default is 30. A daily interval is suggested, and the minimum is one hour or your plan minimum if longer.
4. Save and check your notification connections. Existing permissions, monitor quotas, maintenance and confirmation thresholds apply.

Know what the date means

UptimeOwl discovers the registry RDAP service through IANA and reads its published expiration event. This is registration expiry, not a TLS certificate date, your registrar invoice date or proof that auto-renewal will succeed. Confirm renewal and payment settings directly with your registrar.

The monitor needs attention at the exact UTC expiry instant or when the remaining lifetime reaches your warning window. A later verified date can recover the incident after the normal confirmation rules. Public registry updates may take time to appear.

Unknown is an honest answer

Some extensions have no supported HTTPS RDAP service; some registries omit expiry dates or return ambiguous dates. A subdomain, rate limit, unavailable provider or Redis interruption can also prevent verification. The card explains that expiry is unknown and keeps the previous confirmed state as historical context.

An unknown result does not open a downtime incident, recover an existing incident or create a healthy history point. Confirmation streaks reset. We retry on the configured interval; the uncertainty is visible as delayed status.

A calm pace for registries

Public expiry evidence is shared in Redis for up to six hours; unsupported or unavailable responses can be cached for 15 minutes. Each check still compares the known date against the current time and its own warning window. Manual checks also respect the interval and cache.

At most one initial request per second is admitted for each registry origin, with a five-minute cooldown after rate limiting. Registries can impose stricter policies; a deferred lookup remains unknown. No contact details or full registration documents are stored.