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Why not renew for ten years, then every year extend it by one more year. Best of both worlds and if something screws up, you have 9 more years to fix it.

Ceremonies that aren't critical have a higher likelihood of being skipped, forgotten or ignored...

LetsEncrypt chose 3 months. Maybe that’s a hint for us that frequent renewals are better.

No, for SSL certificates there's value in having a short expiry. For example if the private keys leak. There's no value in having a domain name (that you want to keep) expire.

The value is in forcing you to keep it in mind. You don’t forget about things you have to do every 3 months as easily as something you have to do every 10 years.

If your logic is sound, then explain why I forget to refill my medication on time which I do monthly, but I don’t forget to renew my domains?

You’re comparing apples and oranges. Do you more easily forget a password you use everyday or one you use once a year?

While this statistically might be true, I believe that this is completely dependent on one's personality. Having extra chances to remedy a trouble (which, as can be seen from the article, may occur due to reasons completely out of hand) has notable benefits, such as eliminating such prolonged downtimes.

It is like having replacement toothpaste ready for your bathroom. It is such a nuisance to go out and buy it on the day it runs out, and more likely to have a day without if you do not keep replacements ready.

Is it 10x more likely that a systematized annual renewal is going to fail if the domain name has been registered for 10 years already?

It would be hard to make the case for 2x, but 10x?

This feels like a solid way to do it.

I personally found a period of 1-2 year to be the absolute worst. On the next cycle the man is gone because it's past the average tenure. The emails about it were lost or auto deleted. Any documentation or process is useless because the company or the supplier has changed.

To have a process be remembered, make it monthly or quarterly.

How can you make domain renewals be monthly or quarterly?

If you have multiple domains you could renew them at seperate times.

Has the advantage that a failure might not be so disastrous either.

Only if you had the foresight to register them at different times, right?

Not necessarily, most registrars will let you renew for a full year or more at any time. Buy both on the same day, set a reminder or open a ticket to renew only one domain in 3/6 mo.

Also, get a registrar with an API and use a script to figure out how long a domain is valid. Alarm through your monitoring system when you hit the too close for comfort time frame.

You can scrape whois as well but that seems fragile.

The monthly process isn't necessarily to renew domains - it is to assess the situation to see if there are any that need renewing soon. Many months nothing will need doing, a couple of months per year something will need action.

Even as a small company we have a number of regular infrastructure reviews. Most of the time we just go through the review, find nothing has changed unexpectedly and no new ideas need bringing to the table, we sign off to say all looks well, and the prices takes very little time. Some of this is automated: scripts collate and report information for signoff and we humans verify the result and take actions as needed (in some cases the action needed is to update the script(s)). This may seem wasteful, but a couple of people spending a couple of hours total per month on such checks can save some nasty surprises in future.

Domain status checks is one of the things that gets reviewed.

This is why it's important to use job scheduler software, admined by a NOC, to generate your own internal reminder emails set for a specific date and time in the future. The process of renewing a domain or buying anything that requires renewal should include a step to create the future reminder job.

This is vastly more powerful than you need to simply call a shell script which generates SMTP email to your noc@companyname.com address, but can serve the purpose:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JobScheduler

You can use this for all sorts of things like maintenance notifications, automated emails to a facilities group on N schedule to change air conditioning filters, whatever needs to occur on a specific recurring time schedule.

It's also important that these notifications are sent to an address that is permanently assigned to a role, e.g. noc@company.com, rather than to any particular person, e.g. steve@company.com. Steve might not be there the next time those domains come up for renewal.

The same rule applies to any email address that you use to purchase and renew domains and other critical services. If renewal emails are being sent to someone who doesn't work there anymore, something is very wrong.

We had this same argument about certificate expiration on a code signing project I worked on.

I maintained that having to remember to renew a cert every September was more likely to stick with someone than 18 months or two years. It also keeps your blacklist smaller because dead ones age off faster.

I don’t recall how it ended up but we added automated reminders every 30 days starting three months before expiry.

You could do both. Register it out ten years and each your register an additional one.

10 years sounds a bit inflexible for me. Things can get a little weird if you switch registrars but you have more than 9 years left on your domain so you can't get a full additional year.

I do try to maintain a margin of at least 3 years on important personal and business domains, though.

Less than 37 months left = immediate attention required.

> choose the shortest possible registration window (1 year)

Registering domains for only a year at a time will negatively impact your email reputation.