I have a .com domain name at epik which I wanted to transfer-out but it is not present in my account and when I contacted through chat support I was told it has passed autoRenewPeriod or renewal grace period of 15 days after expiry so I can neither renew it at normal price nor I can transfer it out.
I did not know about that as I have very few .coms with them in the past and also I thought industry standard is 30 days. So is this a new thing or they always had this 15 days renewal grace period after domain expiration?
Thanks in advance.
Our standard grace period is 15 days -- it has always been. Upon request, we can extend it out to as much as day 35.
As for our expiry stream:
We send some TLDs to Snapnames on Day 36.
On day 44, we send to our own "Daily Diamonds" reverse auction with prices dropping to as low as $9:
https://marketplace.epik.com/daily-diamonds
Details on Expired domain policy are here:
https://www.epik.com/support/faq/expired-registration-recovery-policy/
Two things for anyone having trouble with covering renewal fees:
1. Contact us if you need a special arrangement. We have helped folks save entire portfolios from expiry by moving mutually agreed names into co-managed escrow accounts where we help sell off domains.
2. We also do domain loans -- usually interest-free for up to 1 year. For a loan, the domain should be on Epik.com at the start of the loan. Apply
here.
For anyone who does not know the auto-renew economics, the registrar keeps those funds on deposit at the registry, e.g. in our case, it is many
hundreds of thousands of dollars tied up in auto-renew and accrued rebate deposits at Verisign alone.
Sometimes this can be a challenge, e.g. Neustar .CO domains registered at $0.99 in July 2019, come up for $20 auto-renew in July 2020. This is about $600,000 in auto-renewal based on on our July .CO registrations alone. It is what you might call a "Pig in a python".
And now you know!