An expired domain gives no warning. The website stops answering and the email stops arriving at the same moment: no orders, no confirmations, no incoming invoices. And because the failure is not on your server, it appears in no log anybody in the company is watching. Usually you find out because a customer phones.
The right question at that moment is not "whose fault is this". It is which stage the domain is in right now, because that determines what can still be done and what it costs.
The stages of an .it domain
The Italian registry does not delete a name on its expiry date. It moves it through successive states, each with different rules.
The first 15 days — an ordinary renewal still works. The domain sits in a window where it can be renewed normally, at the normal price. The site, though, may already be offline: expiry suspends the services while the name is still yours. This is by far the best stage in which to notice.
There is a quirk of .it worth knowing: once those days pass, if the registrar has not explicitly requested deletion, the Registry renews the domain itself for the following twelve months. A lot of companies have been saved by that without ever knowing why.
Redemption — recoverable, but not free. If deletion was requested, the domain enters a redemption state lasting roughly a month. The name can still be recovered, but not with a renewal: it takes a restore procedure, at a cost above the ordinary renewal.
Pending delete — nothing more can be done. The last days before deletion. The domain can no longer be recovered and is not yet free: you simply wait.
Release. The name becomes available to everybody, at a known and published time. Whoever wanted it was already waiting.
For .com and the other international extensions
The pattern is similar but not identical, which is worth knowing if the company holds both.
After expiry there is a grace period in which renewal is still ordinary — its length is the registrar's choice, so it varies between suppliers. Then comes a thirty-day redemption phase set by ICANN's rules, with a restore fee that usually costs far more than a renewal. Then five days in which nothing can be done, and finally release.
The practical point: restore fees are not your supplier punishing you, they are registry costs. Arguing about them achieves nothing; getting there earlier does.
What to do now, in order
- Check the domain's real state, not the one you assume. The registry's whois says which stage it is in, and it is the only source that counts.
- Call the registrar, not the agency. If you are the Registrant you can act directly, and in a window measured in days, one step fewer matters.
- Renew for the longest period they offer. In the middle of an expiry emergency, a one-year renewal is the choice that brings the same problem back in twelve months.
- Check that the mail is back, not just the site. They are two different things, and the second gets checked first while the first is the one that costs more.
- Only then work out how it happened.
Why it happened, nearly always
The causes repeat with impressive monotony:
- the card on the panel had expired, and the failed-payment notices went to a mailbox nobody opens;
- the notices went to somebody who no longer works there, and their mailbox was closed;
- auto-renewal was on for one domain and not the others, and nobody held the full list;
- the supplier's invoice was disputed and nobody connected the suspension to the domain;
- nobody knew they were responsible, because responsibility had never been assigned.
None of these is a technical problem. They are all inventory problems and email-address problems, which is why they get solved once.
How not to end up here again
It takes little, but it has to be written down somewhere:
- a list of every company domain, with where it is registered, who the Registrant is, and when it expires;
- a reference email address that outlives people — a shared mailbox, not an individual's;
- auto-renewal on, with a valid payment method checked once a year;
- the expiry date on a calendar somebody looks at, not only in the provider's panel;
- monitoring on the domain, which warns before the date rather than after.
The cost of all that is an afternoon. The cost of finding out later is the number of days the company was unreachable, multiplied by what a day is worth.
If you would rather that list existed and somebody else watched the dates, that is precisely what domain registration and management is.