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5 Things every Domain Name Registrant should know about ICANN's Expired Registration Recovery Policy (ERRP)

  1. Registrars must send you at least two renewal reminder notices before the domain name expires, one approximately one month prior to expiration and the second approximately one week prior to expiration. If a domain name registration expires and is deleted by the registrar, the registrar must also send at least one additional notice within 5 days after expiration. This notice must include instructions for restoring the registration. All notices are sent to the registrant email address listed in the official contact information of the domain name so make sure your contact information is up-to-date to receive these important notices.
  2. Registrars must make their renewal fees, post-expiration renewal fees (if different), and redemption/restore fees reasonably available to you and other prospective registrants at the time of registration of a domain name. At a minimum, these fees must be clearly displayed on the registrar's website and a link to these fees, or the fees themselves must be included in the registrar's registration agreements. Registrars must also ensure that these fees are displayed on their resellers' websites. Registrars may change their fees at any time but must notify you if they do. Be sure to keep your contact info up-to-date so you receive any notices of changes to fees.
  3. If the Registrar does not immediately delete the domain name upon expiration, it may offer an Auto Renew Grace Period, a 1-45-day period during which you may renew an expired domain name. This may come at a fee so be sure to read your Registrar's Terms of Service carefully to see if this Period is offered, for how many days, and any fees that might be associated with it. You should be aware that during the auto-renew period, the domain name may be available to third parties for registration, depending on your registrar's terms of service. You may also run the risk of having your domain name auctioned to a third party by your registrar during this period (depending on your terms of service) – yet another reason to be sure you understand your terms of service and always renew your domain name well before it expires.
  4. The ERRP requires all generic TLD registries to offer a Redemption Grace Period ("RGP") of 30 days immediately following the deletion of a domain name registration. During this 30-day period, registries are prohibited from transferring the domain name, and must allow the registered name holder of the domain name to restore the domain name registration. If you are the registered name holder of a domain name that has been deleted by your registrar and want to restore your domain name registration during this Period, you can contact your registrar for assistance. Note that your registrar may charge a fee for this service.
  5. The ERRP requires registrars to disrupt the domain name's DNS service for up to 8 days before deleting the domain name and registries to do the same during the 30-day Redemption Grace Period. The disruption will cause any services associated with the domain name such as a website or email service to no longer work. This disruption is intended to be a last mechanism to inform you that your domain name has expired so that you can take action if you want.

More Information

FAQs: Domain Name Renewals and Expiration

See Infographic: Renew Your Domain Name Before It Expires!

Domain Name Renewal Complaint

More information is available on ICANN's Expired Registration Recovery Policy and Expired Domain Deletion Policy pages.

Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."