There’s no way for me to answer this question without asking another one: how important is the domain in question? Or better yet, is that domain important enough for you to be willing to pay “retail” in order to renew it?
If you only own a few domains then sure, it’s a no brainer. But if you own thousands, it adds up and paying retail for your renewals might/will affect your bottom line. Unfortunately, you can’t apply coupons when auto renewing, that’s why I mentioned the fact that you’d be paying retail.
If we’re talking about strategic domains, don’t take chances. Auto renew all the way because for your top domains, the auto renew option is basically an insurance policy. For less important ones, you can renew after they’ve expired and still use a coupon with most registrars (be careful though, some might charge extra after the domain expired), so the auto renew option isn’t a necessity.
So all in all, if you’re careful, you don’t need the auto renew option but at least for your strategic domains, having it as a “just in case” insurance policy makes sense in my opinion.
July 6th, 2013 at 4:01 pm
I own a few hundred domains at go daddy and use their discount domain club so my auto renews are at wholesale pricing. only costs about 80$ a year and then dont have to mess with coupons at all http://www.godaddy.com/domains/discount-domains.aspx
July 6th, 2013 at 4:11 pm
@Lex: yep, it’s a decent compromise because although you can pretty much always obtain better deals by finding coupons, the Discount Domain Club prices are a lot closer to the ones you can obtain through coupons than the retail prices.
July 7th, 2013 at 12:37 am
I have kept auto-renew off since I use coupons all the time. The best thing is to renew your domains for more than one year and live freely. Personally I would never like to keep auto-renew on ever.
July 7th, 2013 at 1:54 am
@ Lex
Assuming you use your discount club membership mostly for COM renewals I would like to mention that you currently can get a COM renewal with a coupon code for $8.67 per COM (ICANN fee included). With the discount club you pay a bit less, basically $8.47 per COM renewal (ICANN fee included). So you save $0.2 per COM domain renewal with the discount club.
However, since you paid $80 USD to activate your discount club (for a year) you would basically need to renew 400 COM domains in one year just to break even (400 X 0.2 = $80). Sure it’s easy to put your domains on auto-renewal when you’re with the discount club but unless you renew more than 400 COMS per year it’s still a loss. Unless of course you don’t care about that and feel that the convenience of an auto-renewal is worth more than $80/year.
I personally have the discount club myself. I got it for $60 a year (by using a coupon code) so in my case I only need to renew 300 COM domains per year to break even. Since I have around 600 domains at Godaddy it’s a no-brainer for me. That said, my domains registered at Godaddy are on “manual renewal” simply because I usually don’t renew all my domains. Domains purchased through auctions I always renew but domains that I caught on the drop and which I purchased with a $1-2 USD coupon code have a chance of not getting renewed at the end of the year.