My domain has expired.What can I do?
First thing is to do a whois using the form above and see what “state” your expired domain name is. A whois gives you quite detailed information about a domain name including all the details in the public domain record such as expiry date, owners details etc.
Whether you can still renew it if it has been expired for a number of days or weeks will depend on the domain extension and exactly how long it has been expired for. There are different rules for .com’s and each country’s domain names such as .com.au
In the case of a .com.au or .net.au domain name, they can be renewed a upto 90 days before the expiry date, and 30 days after the expiry date. No matter what date a domain is renewed the new expiry date for a .com.au will always be 2 years from the original expiry date.
Once a domain expires, it goes into a state called “Expired Hold” and the domain shows in the WHOIS as:
serverHold (Expired)
serverUpdateProhibited (Expired)
And in this state the following rules apply
1. the domain gets removed from the DNS (i.e won’t work on the internet anymore);
2. the domain cannot be updated;
3. the domain name can be renewed or transferred to another registrar
When a .com.au or .net.au goes precisely 30 days past the expiry date, it enters a new state marked as “Expired Pending Purge” and shows in the WHOIS as:
serverHold (Expired)
serverRenewProhibited (Expired)
serverUpdateProhibited (Expired)
In this state an Australian domain name:-
1. cannot be updated, renewed or transferred to another registar;
2. gets published on the Australian official domain drop list, and precisely one day after this the domains state changes state to “Expired Pending Purge” ;
It then becomes available for purge , and will be purged from the registry at the next purge cycle.
auDa’s official links:
auDA Domain Renewal, Expiry and Deletion Policy (2010-01)
Finding out the expiry date on a .com.au domain
Following abuse of the internic database, the ability to view the expiry date has been removed from the .au domain space. Expiry dates can now only be obtained by the Registrant. If you are a Registrant, and you have lost access to your expiry date, you can only obtain the expiry date from either your Domain Provider or your Domain Registrar
For .com’s domain expiry’s are slightly different
In the case of a .com domain, they can be renewed up to a maximum total of ten years at any time. If your domain is within 30 days after the expiry date, the domain is said to be in the grace period. While a domain is in the grace period, although the domain is expired, you can still login to your domain management account, and renew online.
If it is more than 30 days after the domain has expired, a domain goes into the redemption period. If a domain is in the Redemption period, the domain can still be renewed, but now it becomes a manual process at the Registry, and that becomes much more expensive.
What is the Redemption Period?
The Redemption Period is the window of time that the domain leaves the grace period. Each domain extension has a different redemption period.
The .com extension has a grace period of 30 days, a redemption period of 30 days, and a pending delete period of between 5 and 7 days where nobody can do anything with the domain.
How much is it to get my .com domain back during the Redemption period?
The current cost of a .com redemption is from $175.00 that includes a 1 year registration fee.
I’d like to find out the expiry date on a .com domain, how do I go about doing that?
Use a whois tool like the one above and if the domain is taken and active, the results that return will include the results from a WHOIS query of the internic database, and that result will include the domain’s expiry date
Are the expiry dates listed in the WHOIS database correct?
Unfortunately, it has become apparent that some Registrars are generating false expiry dates in the .com WHOIS database. It is no longer possible to rely on the expiry dates being presented in the public database.
reference: whois au knowledgebase