Domainers have a love-hate relationship with the auto-renew feature pretty much all registrars offer.
On the one hand, we hate receiving that nasty “Your domain has been auto-renewed” email because what it actually means is “we just charged you above-average rates for your domain renewal, thanks!” and nobody likes spending double digits for something they could have had for single digits. Fair enough.
On the other hand though, auto-renew can be a life-saver in certain circumstances. Believe it or not, even domainers are human beings. As such, we’re… well, perishable. What I mean is that life happens, stuff happens or however you choose to phrase it. What if you get involved in a serious car accident and end up being in a coma for an extended period of time? I have a friend who recovered after being in a coma for 3 months (not a typo), for example.
Now sure, in such cases you have more serious problems than renewing your domains (like… you know, surviving) but still: it wouldn’t exactly be fun to finally get back in front of a computer, only to realize that a bunch of let’s say LLL dot coms are now gone because you didn’t renew them and auto-renew was disabled. I mean look, even if you die, you probably want your family to be able to use the domain portion of your wealth, right? If you’re involved in a car accident and don’t survive, it can frequently take a long time until your family recovers emotionally and starts thinking about your assets, domains included. Once again, the auto-renew fee can prove to be not a life safer (because you’re dead in this scenario, sorry) but at least a wealth-saver.
What I’m trying to say is this:
Don’t risk losing gems just to save a buck, make sure the auto-renew feature is always enabled
On the other hand though, always renew or transfer domains before auto-renew kicks in and use coupons whenever possible to ensure you aren’t paying too much
Fair enough?
January 24th, 2019 at 2:39 pm
Good advice and a pet peeve of many I’m sure. Autorenew isn’t a bad feature either on extensions that you know are cheaper, such as .ch .nl and .de, and there are some country code extensions that almost have to be on autorenew (you can’t renew manually). If you have valuable domains on autorenew, there is no harm to renewing earlier if you think you’ll get a lower price somehow with a coupon or something, just be sure you understand the timing of when the autorenew kicks in and try to be earlier. It would be great if there was a registrar that thought like the domain owner does, and would give you the best price on autorenew available by default (as if you were doing it yourself).