Why we built it
A server failing is loud. A domain failing is quiet. The registration has an expiry date that sits in a registrar account somebody set up years ago, and the renewal notice goes to an inbox nobody reads any more. The SSL certificate has its own separate deadline, often only 90 days away. Name servers and DNS records can be changed in a few clicks — by a colleague, a migration, or someone who shouldn’t have access — and the site keeps answering normally until the change propagates.
What struck us is that almost none of this is unpredictable. The dates are known in advance. The records are public. The change is visible the moment it happens. The information needed to prevent the outage is available — it’s just that nobody is looking at it, and the tools most teams already run don’t look at it either. An uptime monitor answers one question: is the site responding right now? It cannot see a domain expiring next month, because until the moment it lapses the server is perfectly healthy.
So we built the thing that watches underneath: the registration, the certificate, the WHOIS record, the DNS — four signals, one place, checked on a schedule, with the alert arriving while there is still time to act.
How the checks actually work
We think this part deserves specifics rather than adjectives, because “we monitor your domain” can mean almost anything.
- Registration and expiry. We read registration data over RDAP — the structured, modern replacement for WHOIS — using IANA’s bootstrap registry to know which service is authoritative for each TLD, and falling back to WHOIS where that’s what a registry publishes.
- TLDs that publish nothing. Some ccTLDs (.de, .es, .eu among them) don’t expose registration data publicly at all. Rather than guess, we cross-check name servers over DNS so a registered domain is never reported as free, and let you set the expiry date by hand where the registry simply doesn’t publish one.
- SSL certificates. We open a TLS connection to the host on port 443, read the certificate the server actually serves, and check its validity window — daily, plus on demand whenever you want to confirm a renewal went through.
- DNS records. A, AAAA, MX, NS and TXT are compared against the last known state. A changed A record, a swapped name server or a broken SPF entry in TXT is a change event, not a guess.
- WHOIS changes. Registrar and name server changes, plus status codes like clientHold, pendingTransfer and pendingDelete — often the earliest visible sign of a transfer or a lapse in progress. The registry’s own Updated Date is compared too, so a record being touched is noticed even when none of those fields moved.
Expiry reminders fire at 30, 14, 7 and 1 days by default, and you can add your own intervals. They’re sent independently of your registrar, which matters on the day a registrar notice lands in a mailbox nobody checks.