Domain monitoring, explained
Registration, DNS, the certificate, mail authentication, and the site. They have different owners, different expiry dates and different failure modes, and none of them sends you a message when it goes wrong. Domain monitoring is reading all five on a schedule and keeping the previous answer so a change is visible.
The checkup asks you to create a free account before it shows the report. No card, and the account keeps your results so the next scan is a comparison rather than a fresh opinion.
The five layers
The symptom column is the useful one. Most of these arrive at your desk as the same sentence — “the website is down” — and the layer they came from is what decides who can fix it.
Why nobody notices
ICANN's Expired Registration Recovery Policy makes registrars send renewal reminders roughly a month out and again about a week out. They go to the registrant email on the registration record. On a domain bought six years ago, that is often a person who has left, a mailbox that now bounces, or a privacy-service forwarder pointed at the same place.
Auto-renew is a charge attempt, not a guarantee. A card expires, a bank declines an unfamiliar merchant, the domain sits in an account whose payment method was never updated. The registrar records a failed charge. Nobody on your side sees a failure — they see the absence of a receipt, which looks identical to not looking.
A marketing agency points a subdomain at a landing page tool. An email vendor asks for a new TXT record and the old one gets replaced instead of added. Both are ordinary work. Neither generates a notification, and the SPF record that broke will not be noticed until a customer says they never got the quote.
Let's Encrypt certificates last 90 days, so the renewal is automated and invisible. When the automation breaks, whether from a moved webroot, a changed firewall rule or an expired API token, nothing is different for weeks. Then every visitor gets an interstitial at once.
What it is not
How DomainGuard does it
Unlimited domains, checked whenever you press scan, with every result kept so the next one is a comparison. Dark-web breach checks and alerts when a vulnerability is published for software found on your sites run automatically. Nothing else scans on its own.
25 domains on Starter, 100 on Pro, unlimited on Enterprise, re-checked daily without being asked. That is where the alerts live: an expiring certificate, a changed DNS record, a site that stopped answering, a DMARC report showing a sender you do not recognize.
A web dashboard and an iPhone app, same account and same data. The iPhone app is in public beta on TestFlight while we finish it. There is no Android app, and the web dashboard is dark theme only.
Re-reading the public records a domain depends on, meaning registration, DNS, certificate, mail authentication and the HTTP response, on a schedule, keeping each answer, and telling you when one of them changes or is about to expire.
Uptime monitoring asks whether the server answered. Domain monitoring asks whether the name will still be yours next month, whether the certificate will still be valid next week, and whether anyone can send mail pretending to be you. A site can be up and failing all three.
No. The data is public: the registry's RDAP record, the authoritative DNS answers, the certificate the server presents, the Certificate Transparency logs, and the HTTP response headers. Nothing is installed and nothing logs in to your site.
Daily is enough for registration and certificate expiry, because both fail on a known date. DNS and mail authentication are worth checking daily too, since a change is silent. Uptime is the only one that needs minutes rather than days.
The account is free and holds unlimited domains, checked whenever you press scan. What a paid plan buys is domains watched without being asked: 25 on Starter at $6.99 a month, 100 on Pro, unlimited on Enterprise, plus DMARC report processing and SEO scans. Plans are bought through Apple in-app purchase.
Domain expiration monitoring
The grace, redemption and pending-delete clock, and the five ways auto-renew fails.
DMARC monitoring
What is inside an aggregate report, and how to read one without a parser.
Website security checklist
Items you can work through today, with how to verify each one yourself.
Tools compared
Registrar alerts, uptime monitors, brand-protection suites, DIY scripts and all-in-ones.
Domain portfolio management
Building the inventory, then keeping it: locks, payment methods, parked-domain hygiene.
The free tools
Domain checkup, IT checkup, lookalike domain check and the password checker.
