Getting warned before your domain or certificate expires

Two things about your website have to be renewed, and forgetting either takes the site down:

• Your domain name (like example.com), which you rent by the year.
• Your SSL certificate, which gives visitors the padlock in their browser. Without a valid one, browsers show a scary warning instead of your site.

An expiry monitor watches both and warns you ahead of time.

Set it up

1. Open Domain names and add one (or go to app.offalerts.com/domain-name-create).
2. Enter just the domain, such as example.com. Leave off the https:// and anything after the .com.
3. Choose how many days ahead you want to be warned. You can set this separately for the domain and for the certificate.
4. Pick where each warning should go and save.

Good to know

• Checks run periodically rather than every few minutes, because expiry dates change rarely. A new monitor may take a while to show its first dates.
• Some domain endings don’t publish their expiry date. For those, the certificate date still works but the registration date may be blank.
• If you renew, the monitor picks up the new date on its next check. You don’t need to recreate it.