It's never too early to renew domain names

When you renew a domain, you extend your period of ownership. Every domain has an expiry date, and every renewal pushes that expiry date further into the future.

Even if your domain is months or even years away from expiring, you can still renew it now. However many years you add, they'll take effect after the expiry date.

Four reasons to be proactive

There are plenty of reasons to renew domains before the reminder emails start to arrive. Here are a few of our favourites.

Lock in today's prices

Domain prices have the unhappy habit of rising over time. If you want your domain to stay active for years in the future, you can pre-pay for that extra time today. Then who'll be feeling smart when the next price hike arrives?

Have extra certainty

It's not likely that a domain will expire without you noticing, but it does happen.

We send email reminders before domains are due to expire, and you also have the option of setting domains to auto-renew in the days before their expiry date. These are both convenient but not foolproof. Reminders get missed when email addresses change. Auto-renewals fail if your saved credit card details aren't up to date.

The only 100% guarantee that a domain will still be yours is if you've already renewed it.

Even if your domain is months or even years away from expiring, you can still renew it now. However many years you add, they'll take effect after the expiry date.

Manage your cashflow

Especially if you have a lot of domains, your renewal schedule can make a difference to your cashflow. No matter when your domains are due to expire you can renew them any time of year. This can work to your advantage.

You might want to spread your domain portfolio's renewals out over the year - one-quarter each in February, May, August and November, for example - or deal with all your renewal costs at the time of year that suits you best. Whatever you choose, you're in control.

Don't rely on a complex system working perfectly at the last minute

The technical infrastructure behind domains is incredibly reliable, but nothing is perfect. Without going into the complexities of domain registries and registrars, it's enough to say that for a domain to successfully renew a lot of different systems run by different organisations need to talk to each other. Outages are unlikely but possible. You want to have enough time to try again later before your expiry date hits.

This was why, when InternetNZ replaced its registry system last year, we recommended that people got renewals done before the upheaval started.

How to renew domains

Everything you need to know is in the Knowledge base: How to renew a domain name.

Main image: Photo by mostafa mahmoudi on Unsplash