Is your domain actually in your name?
Your domain is your website address and your email address at the same time. If it lapses, both stop. So, two questions: whose name is yours registered in, and when does it renew?
An hour without a website or email
On Thursday 13 August, at 10:47 in the morning, the domain of a business I built a website for disappeared from the internet. The registrar, the company the domain was registered through, had put it on hold. For most of the internet the website stopped loading and email to the business stopped arriving.
My monitoring flagged it within five minutes. The odd part was that from my own computer the site still looked fine, because my computer remembered where the site used to be. Anyone checking from a phone or another network got nothing.
The domain was not registered through me, so I could not renew it myself. I phoned the owner, the registrar was paid, and at 11:45 it was back. About an hour on a weekday morning, and it was only fixed that quickly because somebody was watching.
Four questions worth answering today
Whose name is it registered in? It should be your business. A domain registered in a developer’s or a former employee’s name means somebody else controls your address.
Which email address gets the renewal notices? If it is an old address nobody reads, the renewal invoice goes nowhere.
When does it renew? Write the date down somewhere you will see it.
Is your email on the same domain? Then a lapsed domain takes your email with it, and customers who wrote to you think you ignored them.
How to find out
Registration details are private these days, so nobody can look this up for you from the outside. Find the last renewal invoice, or ask whoever set it up to show you the account.