Problem Description
- Your domain expired
- You renewed the domain within the grace period. How long is the grace period is for each TLD?
- Yet the site is not back online yet
Problem Resolution
A domain renewal after it has expired will trigger the usual 'up to 48 hour' DNS update time necessary to ensure the site is available again at all locations. That said, there can be glitches in this process at the registrar; we've seen it quite a bit particularly with 3rd party registrar services. Therefore, we recommend following these steps after renewal to verify everything is going smoothly with the DNS process:
- Wait 30 minutes to ensure the changes have time to propagate to at least the root DNS servers and WHOIS records
- Run a check to see if the DNS propagation is working to at least some locations at whatsmydns.net. Enter your domain name, and you should see that at least a few locations show the correct IP address for your hosting plan.
- Check whois records to ensure the status doesn't continue to indicate that it's in the expired or expired grace period. It will also show your name servers in the whois records - be sure those match the correct ones for your hosting. If you're hosted with us, these are shown in our Client Centre when you click on settings for the matching hosting plan.
If the whois records do not show an expired status, your name servers are correct, and you see some signs of propagation at whatsmydns, then you can be quite certain that it'll just take a bit of time for the propagation process to complete.
If you need to access the site immediately, consider either switching your device's DNS to Cloudflare or Google Public DNS. These services tend to refresh their DNS cache every few minutes rather than every few hours (or longer) for most Internet Service Providers. However this will only work for your system, and will not affect others visiting the site - they will need to wait to see the site live again.
