domain & expiry
who owns it, when it lapses
The registration is the one thing that takes everything down at once. Not the website, not the mail — both, the same morning, with nothing to roll back to.
About this check
·Expiry is most of this page
A lapsed domain stops serving the website and stops delivering mail at the same moment, and once it is released anyone may buy it. Auto-renew plus a payment card that has not itself expired is the whole fix, which is worth confirming rather than assuming — the card is the half that usually lapses first.
·A transfer lock is free, and most domains do not have one
The lock stops the name being moved to another registrar until you remove it yourself. It is one toggle in the registrar account, it costs nothing, and it is the single best defence against a domain being taken. Registrars rarely set it by default.
·Where these facts come from
RDAP, the registry protocol that replaced WHOIS, read live through our own server rather than the browser — registries redirect to one another and a browser is stopped from following that. Some extensions publish no RDAP at all; where that happens the page says the registry is not reachable rather than reporting the domain as unregistered.