When a domain expires through us, it becomes inactive immediately, a parking page is displayed, and all the services attached to it, such as a website and/or email cease to function. It is not possible to make any updates to the domain while it is expired. The domain will remain available for reactivation at your regular domain rate for a non-guaranteed period of time. Currently, we offer a non-guaranteed 29-day grace period for renewal for many TLDs. Each registry has different rules for their grace periods. There is no guaranteed grace period. Once a domain expires, we may dispose of it at any time according to the registration agreement. After the grace period elapses, the domain may go into a Redemption Grace Period. There is a $400 fee to restore your domain from Redemption status and it is not discountable.
The Registrar (ENOM) is a kind and caring company. They realize that many people make the mistake of not renewing their domain name before the due date.
They also know that there are evil cybersquatters who scoop up expired domain names and then charge thousands of dollars to get the domain name back.
So, they came up with a wonderful program! They renew almost every domain name (most tld's) that expires. As you can imagine - this costs them
huge amounts of money - since only a small number or people ever request to have their domain name back. Since maybe only one in 50 domains may
ever "Redeem" their domain, they get stuck holding the bill on all the other domain names and they may never recover their costs.
So, the cost of $400 to "Redeem" your domain name is actually a bargain. Consider if they had simply released it into the public domain, where an evil
cybersquatter could have registered it and then charged you $10,000 for the domain. What choice would you have? Either pay his price or sue them.
Either way, it would have cost you many thousands of dollars and would take years to recover your domain - all the while the domain would be out of service, etc.
So, please understand that even though the price to redeem the domain name may seem high, it is actually just the costs that have gone into the program to save your domain name.
