Guide
Monitoring your clients' domains without losing your days to it
You delivered the site, you handed over the credentials, and the domain is still your problem. Here is how to set up monitoring that holds — the inventory, what to watch, how often, and who should be told.
7 min readUpdated August 25, 2026
1. The problem nobody handed you
No line in the contract says “the agency monitors domain expiry”. No line says the opposite either. And the day the domain lapses, the client calls neither their registrar nor their host: they call whoever built the site.
It is an implicit responsibility, unbilled, and invisible as long as it is carried. It only becomes visible the day it was not — and on that day it costs a client relationship, not a few hours of work.
The good news: it takes very little work when it is tooled, and a great deal when it rests on your memory.
2. Start with the inventory
Almost no agency knows how many domains it manages. Make the list: a four-column table is enough — the domain, the client, which registrar holds it, and who owns the account. That last column is the most important and the most often empty.
Two classic discoveries at this stage. Domains belonging to nobody identifiable: bought by a former contractor, by the owner's nephew, on an email address that no longer exists. And domains you were monitoring without knowing it, for a client who left two years ago.
Use the inventory to decide: the ones you keep, and the ones whose responsibility you hand back in writing. An email saying “we no longer monitor this domain as of 1 September” beats a doubt left hanging.
3. What to watch, and how often
Four things cover the overwhelming majority of incidents. Domain EXPIRY, checked once a day — the most total and most avoidable outage of all. The SSL CERTIFICATE, several times a day: auto-renewal fails silently, and nobody notices before the date. Site AVAILABILITY, in minutes: it is the one place where the gap between five minutes and six hours genuinely shows.
The fourth is EMAIL AUTHENTICATION and domain reputation, checked daily. It causes no visible outage, which is exactly what makes it expensive: the site stays up, email leaves, it simply stops arriving, and days are spent looking in the wrong place.
DNS changes usefully round out the set, especially if your clients have access to their own zone. An MX record changed on a Friday evening by a new mail provider is the kind of thing you would rather learn from an alert.
Check your own domain, right now
Take one of your clients' domains: the full report tells you in thirty seconds where it stands on the four points above. No account.
4. Who tells whom
An alert landing in an inbox nobody reads is worth nothing. Decide three things before wiring anything up: which address or channel receives it, who is expected to act, and within what delay. Write it down, even in three lines.
For a small team, a dedicated Slack or Discord channel works better than email: several people see it, and an untreated alert stays in front of everyone. For a freelancer, email is enough — as long as it is not the general contact address, buried under enquiries.
Plan for storms too. When a host goes down, ten domains alert at once; without grouping, the inbox becomes unusable at the precise moment it needs to be readable.
5. Billing it, or not
Two schools, and both hold up. The first folds monitoring into an existing maintenance retainer: nothing to renegotiate, and it strengthens the perceived value of a retainer you are sometimes asked to justify. The second makes it a separate line, which makes it visible — therefore debatable, but also defensible when an incident happens.
What matters more than the price: that the client KNOWS someone is watching. An agency that sends a quarterly summary of its client's domain health turns an invisible burden into proof of work. Same effort, completely different commercial result.
We will not tell you what to charge: we know neither your market nor your clients. The agency page does offer a calculator to weigh your price against ours.
Five free domains to start the inventory.
Take the five domains that worry you most, add them, let it run for a week. If nothing comes back, you will at least have taken five lines off your mental load — and it will have cost you nothing.
Start for freeFive domains free, forever. No card required.